Facebook kept oversight board in the dark about its ‘Cross-Check’ program

The tech giant “has not fully come forward about Cross-Check,” the supervisory board said in a report published Thursday. “On some occasions facebook has failed to provide relevant information to the Council, while in other cases the information it did provide was incomplete,” it added.

Facebook uses Cross-Check to review content decisions involving high-profile users, such as politicians, celebrities, and journalists. The program had exploded to 5.8 million users by 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a report published last month, the Wall Street Journal used internal company documents to show that Cross-Check protects VIPs from: Facebooks (FB) normal enforcement procedures. In practice, this means that messages that violate company rules are not immediately removed or that certain people are immune from enforcement action.

“Sometimes it appears from the documents, [Cross-Check] has protected public figures whose posts contain intimidation or incitement to violence, violations that would normally result in sanctions for regular users,” the Journal said.

In a written statement, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told the Journal that criticism of Cross-Check was justified, but added that the system was “designed for an important reason: to create an extra step so that we can accurately enforce policies regarding content that may require greater understanding.”

Despite the significant size of Cross-Check, Facebook made no mention of the program when it asked its board of trustees to review its decision to block former President Donald Trump from using its platform. Instead, Facebook only mentioned the program when the oversight board asked whether Trump’s page or account was subject to regular content moderation procedures.

Facebook told its board of trustees that the program only applied “to a small number of decisions,” which the company subsequently acknowledged was misleading, the board of directors said. It also provided “no meaningful transparency about the criteria for accounts or pages selected for inclusion in Cross-Check,” despite a request from the board to do so.

The board said Thursday it had accepted a request from Facebook to review Cross-Check and make recommendations on how to change it.

“We believe the board’s work has had an impact, so we have asked the board for input on our Cross-Check system, and we will strive to be clearer in our explanations to them in the future,” the spokesman said in a statement.