It’s a On the first day of April 2022, I was sitting in the meeting room in downtown Manhattan of a law firm at the meeting of Meta’s Board of Supervisors, the Committee independent body the scrutiny of its content decisions. And for a few minutes, despair seemed to have set in.
The current topic is Meta’s controversial Cross-Checking program, which gives special treatment to posts by certain power users—celebs, journalists, government officials , etc. For many years this program worked in secret and Meta even fooled the board about its scope. When program details was leaked The Wall Street Journal, it’s clear that millions of people have already received that special treatment, meaning their posts are less likely to be taken down when reported by algorithms or other users for violating anti-virus rules. against things like hate speech. The idea is to avoid making mistakes in situations where the error would have a greater impact—or confuse Meta—because of the speaker’s prominence. Internal documents show that Meta researchers are concerned about the correctness of the project. Only after that exposure did Meta ask the board to review the program and recommend what the company should do with it.
The meeting I witnessed was part of that calculation. And the tone of the discussion made me wonder if the board would recommend that Meta shut down the program altogether, in the name of fairness. “Policy must be for everyone!” exclaimed a council member.
That didn’t happen. This week, the social media world paused its search for active content moderation shipwrecks Elon Musk in progress at Twitterwhen the Supervisory Board finally assigned Its Cross-Test report, delayed due to Meta dragging in providing information. (It never provided the board with a defined list of people with special permissions to prevent takedowns, at least until someone took a closer look at the post.) True conclusions. acrimonious. Meta stated that the purpose of the program was to improve the quality of decisions about content, but the board determined that its purpose was to protect the company’s business interests. Meta never established processes to monitor the program and assess whether it was fulfilling its mission. The lack of transparency with the outside world is appalling. Finally, Meta frequently fails to provide quick personalized action, which is why those posts don’t get taken down as quickly. There are simply too many such cases for Meta’s team to handle. They usually last for days before being considered secondary.
Good example, featured in the original WSJ reported, was a post from Brazilian soccer star Neymar who posted an erotic image without the consent of its subject in September 2019. Thanks to special treatment for participating in Elite Cross-Check, the image — a flagrant violation of policy — garnered more than 56 million views before it was eventually removed. The program aims to reduce the impact of content decision mistakes on promote the impact of terrible content.
However, the board did not recommend Meta to close Cross-Test. Instead, it calls for an overhaul. The reason is not at all an endorsement of the show but an acknowledgment of the devilish difficulty of content moderation. hidden meaning of Report of the Supervisory Board is the hopelessness of believing that it is possible to make things right. Meta, like other platforms that provide a voice for users, has long emphasized growth before caution and hosting huge volumes of content requires huge costs for the police. Meta spends millions on moderation—but still makes millions of errors. Seriously cutting those mistakes costs more money than the company is willing to spend. The idea of Cross-Checking is to minimize the error rate on the posts of the most important or prominent people. When a celebrity or statesman uses its platform to speak to millions, Meta doesn’t want to screw things up.
