Facebook Cross-check criticised as unfair, under-resourced and opaque

Facebook's Cross-check system was taken to task by Meta's Oversight Board for unfairly providing VIP users with less onerous rules than everyone else and having a poorly resourced and opaque system to manage them.

The Oversight Board found that the Cross-check system results in users being treated unequally, that it lead to substantial delays in taking down rule-violating content (on average, decisions took more than 5 days, with some cases taking up to 7 months), and it appears to be structured more to satisfy the company's commercial objectives rather than to advance Meta's human rights commitments.

It also found that while only 9 percent of Facebook's daily active users are from the US and Canada, 42 percent of content reviewed under Cross-check came from these two countries, and that Facebook had failed to provide crucial details about Cross-check to the Oversight Board, including criteria for adding accounts to the system.

The Oversight Board made 32 recommendations to improve the Cross-check, including developing clearer criteria for account eligibility and making these public, allowing individuals to apply for the programme proactively, visually communicating an account's Cross-check status to users, increasing resources to ensure the timely review of flagged content, and prioritising posts important for human rights and considered of special public importance.

➕ March 2023. Meta agreed to the Oversight Board's recommendation to publish regular Transparency Reports on Cross-check and to limit the distribution of content from high-profile individuals that likely violated platform rules until their posts had been adjudicated.