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Facebook had a problem on its hands. People were making posts that got caught in the company's automated moderation system or were 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 that the people behind the posts were famous or noteworthy, and 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. Over the years, XCheck has allowed celebrities, politicians, athletes, activists, journalists, and even the owners of "animal influencers" like "Doug the Pug" to post whatever they want, with few to no consequences for violating the 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 the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences."
"Few" must be a relative term at Facebook, as at least 5.8 million people were enrolled in the program as of last year, many of them with significant followings. That means a large number of influential people are allowed to post largely unchecked on Facebook and Instagram.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @04:03PM (2 children)
The issue is that when I've been on sites like that, it's devolved rather quickly due to Gabe's GIFT. I'd start out on a new site and things seemed great, then a bunch of morons would come and screw things up, but because the admins were more idealistic in not banning anything other than the most egregious behaviors, the site would go down the crapper rather quickly.
I prefer a lighter touch to modding, but if you want a decent SNR on the site and for people to actually come back regularly, some moderation is needed.
The real issue is that high profile figures are allowed to violate the rules that apply to everybody else. I wouldn't have had an issue if Twitter had banned President Trump years earlier for his violations of their ToS, but waiting so long and then doing it seems to be a bit of a strange choice. He'd been violating the rules for years and suddenly he went too far? BS, they just didn't want to keep dealing with the calls for regulation and thought it might put that off until the future when people were less angry about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @05:34PM (1 child)
> if you want a decent SNR on the site and for people to actually come back regularly, some moderation is needed
So you are saying, there's a profit-motive to decrease the SNR on sites that do not have moderation...? I've seen it happen. Google groups used to have a neat web-based portal to usenet groups, which lasted about 5 years until spam completely destroyed it. At least there's Facebook and Twitter, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @06:51PM
Imho, there's a range, but at a certain point, it's not worth the effort. Part of why these sites exist is that email became a pain to use due to spam and a lack of effective way to communicate with groups. Email was relatively universal, and still is, but much of what people did with it has migrated to platforms that could remove some of the junk.
Sifting through some crap to get to the gems isn't a problem, but when it's 98% crap that you don't want, you're probably going to move on or cease using it.