A Facebook oversight committee has criticized the company’s account verification policy, concluding in a report that the platform offers preferential treatment to specific accounts over others, delaying content oversight and fueling the spread of fake news. or hate messages.
Specifically, it is the Facebook cross-verification program that, in case of detecting sensitive content that violates the company’s policy, cancels the content or suspends an account.
However, when it comes to one of the accounts that the company considers preferential, before taking a measure, a second review is made, explains The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
In addition, these accounts are exempt from some or all of the penalties that regular accounts are exposed to for not complying with the rules of the social network.
In its report, echoed by the New York newspaper, the committee maintains that the second review of “VIP” accounts causes sensitive content to remain undeleted for days or even weeks, something that does not occur with non-privileged accounts, that are deleted or blocked as soon as the violation is detected.
“Cross-checking is not designed or implemented in a way that complies with Meta’s (Facebook’s parent company) human rights responsibilities or company values (…). Despite significant public concern about the program , Meta has not effectively addressed the problematic components of its system,” concludes the report, collected by the WSJ.
According to the newspaper, more than five million accounts received some type of protection and, due to the lack of human capital, the complaints made against the content of these accounts were not routinely reviewed.
The oversight committee is made up of a group of professors, lawyers, human rights activists and others who are commissioned by Facebook to review cases that have the potential to guide future decisions about the company’s content policy.
The report emphasizes that Facebook has implemented this policy despite its insistence that it applies the same policies to all users without exception.