Facebook’s Oversight Board, ostensibly an independent group created by the company to give an air of governance to its operations, will investigate claims from the Wall Street Journal that it has separate moderation rules for politicians, celebrities and other high-profile operators.
The board will be looking into the program, known as Cross Check, which allegedly protected “millions” of celebrity users from the usual level of moderation applied to regular Facebook users.
The board said Facebook “sent an explanation of cross-check but did not elaborate criteria for adding pages and accounts to the system, and declined to provide reporting on error rates.”
Facebook had previously said in June that it would end these exemptions, but are not forthcoming on information as to what exact these exemptions meant. WSJ claims the company allowed high-profile users to post on Facebook unchecked.
