On more than one occasion, Mark Zuckerberg has made an effort to emphasize that the standards of behavior on Facebook apply to everyone, regardless of their status or fame; However, the WSJ notes that a 2019 internal review of the social network’s ‘whitelisting’ practices found that favoritism towards certain users was widespread.
Facebook operates under the “cross-checking” or “XCheck” program, initially intended to function as a quality control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, such as celebrities, politicians, and journalists. The initial goal was misrepresented and today, this feature “protects millions of VIP users from the normal running process of the company,” according to research by journalist Jeff Horwitz.
With this, users included in the ‘white lists’, are immune to compliance actions, are allowed to publish material that infringes the rules of the social network and are exempt from the reviews of Facebook employees.
At times, documents show, XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would normally result in sanctions for regular users.
Who are on the ‘whitelists’?
One of the cases pointed out in the WSJ work is that of the soccer player Neymar, who in 2019 showed nude photos of a woman who had accused him of rape; The content was available to the player’s tens of millions of followers before Facebook decided to remove the material.