Oversight board criticizes Meta for preferential treatment

Influential and powerful users on Facebook and Instagram receive "unequal treatment", according to an internal report.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, was harshly criticized Tuesday by a company-appointed oversight board for its policies that give celebrities, politicians and business partners special treatment over the vast majority of its users.

Under a program called cross-verification, people with high follower counts were able to say and share things on Facebook and Instagram that would otherwise have been quickly removed for violating company policies, says the Oversight Board, which Meta created to adjudicate thorny political issues related to free speech, human rights and in moderation of the tale nu.

"The board is concerned about how Meta has prioritized commercial interests in content moderation," the board said in a report. The cross-check program, he said, "provided additional protection for some users' expression." drastically” increasing transparency about who is on the program’s V.I.P. list and hiding their posts while they are scrutinized. Meta should prioritize speech, which is "of particular public importance", he added. Recommendations made by the council, which includes around 20 academics, human rights experts and lawyers, are non-binding.

The report reiterates the power of social media to decide which posts to keep, what to delete and how to deal with specific accounts. Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and others have long come under scrutiny for making unilateral decisions about content on their platforms that can influence political debates and societal issues.

Meta has scaled back its social networking business in recent months after criticism over toxic content on those platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, instead prioritized entering the immersive digital world of the metaverse. Meta has spent billions of dollars on this change, although it's unclear whether consumers will embrace Metaverse-related products. The company recently laid off more than 11,000 employees, about 13% of its workforce.

"Meta's Supervisory Board's call for a major content moderation rules will create more fairness, a level playing field and keep V.I.P. profiling users to the same high standards as the common user,” said Brian Uzzi, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. . "To avoid chaos, there should be one rule to rule them all."

Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs at Meta, said Tuesday that Meta had created the cross-check system to prevent mistakenly deleted messages from having an outsized impact. He said the company will respond to the oversight board's report within 90 days.

The oversight board has begun investigating the cross-check program l last year after its existence was reported by The Wall. Street Journal and a whistleblower, Frances Haugen. The board of directors sharply criticized the company last year for not being transparent about the...