Category: General|Sep 15, 2021 | Author: Admin

Facebook's secret rules differentiate between the "elite" and most people

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• mark zuckerberg
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The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has seen internal Facebook documents showing that high-profile users are not subject to the site's rules in the same way that the rest of us are. Users who have news value, are influential, popular or are associated with "PR risk" for the company, are allowed to allow themselves otherwise "illegal" things on the platform without being reprimanded or banned.

If you have news value, are popular, or can damage FB, you should not be moderated

Facebook uses a system they call cross-check (XCheck) to free high-profile users from moderation that would otherwise affect you and me.

 

Examples of users who can afford more than others are, according to WSJ, former President Donald Trump, football player Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

 

Neymar was allowed to post nude photos
XCheck is said to have prevented the moderators from deleting a post from Neymar in which he posted screenshots from a WhatsApp chat he had with a woman who accused him of rape.

 

The screenshots contained nude photos of the woman. Had normal users posted similar material, Facebook's moderators would have deleted the post.

 

The XCheck system sends notifications to Facebook when it detects questionable content, but if the user this content originates from, on the XCheck list, it can pass without being reviewed. Less than ten percent of XCheck content notified last year was checked by Facebook.

 

Negative PR trumps the "standards"
Another weakness of the system is that most Facebook employees can add accounts to XCheck without keeping a record of who they add to or why they did so.

 

One of the reasons Facebook operates with a system like this is that they want to avoid negative PR.

 

When the system to avoid negative PR meant that they received negative PR, Facebook said that they want to get rid of the system and that they have presented a plan to limit the number of employees who can add new users in XCheck.

 

The notifier asks for protection
The person who provided the documents to the WSJ has requested federal protection as an alert.

 

The documents will be submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (US Federal Bureau of Investigation) and Congress, where they will be further investigated.

 

Comment: Facebook's "standards"
The fact that Facebook has defined the platform's content as its responsibility instead of defining itself as a multi-platform where each individual is made responsible for their content according to the elected authorities' definition of right and wrong, becomes no less problematic when it turns out that Facebook operates with different standards for different people.

 

The fact that the person who leaked the information is asking for nationwide protection is not a good sign either.

 

The criteria on which Facebook bases its “standards” could be interesting to gain insight into.

 

Their definition of the “standards” at the Transparency Center is superficial and without any moral-philosophical / ethical justification. They do not mention freedom of speech in one word, but surround themselves with elastic formulations such as "making sure that the content people see on Facebook is authentic".

 

Furthermore, they believe "that all people are equal and have equal rights" - if they are not celebrities or that it can lead to negative PR for the company to moderate them.

 

One of ITavisen's readers wrote some time ago in the comments field: "We can not get into the situation that Facebook controls the exchange of words in our country."

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