Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images )
Facebook had a problem on its hands. People were posting things to their accounts that would get caught in the company’s automated moderation system or taken down by its human moderators. The problem wasn’t that the moderators, human or otherwise, were wrong to take down the posts. No, the problem was the particular people behind the posts had been famous or noteworthy and typically the company didn’t want a PR mess on its hands.
So Facebook came up with a program called XCheck, or cross check, which in many instances became a de facto whitelist that, over the years, has allowed celebrities, politicians, athletes, activists, journalists, and even animal influencers like “Doug the Pug” to post whatever they want with few to no consequences for violating this company’s rules.
“For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards, ” reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation . “Unlike often the rest of our community, these people can violate our requirements without any consequences. ”
Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
