9 ms·

Facebook kept its own oversight board in the dark on program for VIP users

254 points by hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

scohesc 5y ago
The Facebook Oversight Board sounds like a bunch of creepy silhouettes in a darkened boardroom moving pawns on a figurative chessboard.
- fforflo 5y ago
  "World Government" in One Piece
  - suprfsat 5y ago
    "Peter Thiel" in the 2010 film The Social Network
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  sounds like a bunch of people getting paid for doing nothing
  - kfprt 5y ago
    Paid to lobby their friends in the media not to criticize the company too harshly. I'd say money well spent.
- gadders 5y ago
  It's a sinecure for failed politicians and academics.
raj2569 5y ago
VIP users looks eerie after squid games!
- suprfsat 5y ago
  Truly this is like an episode of black mirror.
kfprt 5y ago
In Facebook land some animals are more equal than others and their pseudo government is ineffectual because a secret program pulls all the strings. I'm sure this isn't analogous to the rest of the world.
alex_c 5y ago
>Facebook failed to provide crucial details about its "Cross-Check" program that reportedly shielded millions of VIP users from the social media platform's normal content moderation rules, according to the company's oversight board. >Facebook told the oversight board that the program applied only "to a small number of decisions," which the company subsequently acknowledged was misleading Indeed. Millions of users is a tiny fraction of Facebook's total user count, so in terms of absolute numbers it is probably a relatively small number of content. But in terms of reach and influence, I would expect the VIP users to have by far a disproportionately large share. I would also expect them to be the most likely to post content that would end up in front of an oversight board. But of course, they are also the ones most able to raise a stink if Facebook moderates their content...
- barelysapient 5y ago
  I guess its not much of an oversight board then! The number of accounts under the program versus not I think misses the point. Facebook has separate rules that a privileged few get to play by. So privileged in fact, that their self appointed overseers didn't in fact oversee. And these board members? What a joke. A kangaroo board. How embarrassing for those board members.
  - kfprt 5y ago
    The board members were chosen for their placating potential not any governance capacity.
  - fatjokes 5y ago
    Not much of a VIP either! Millions of them... I'm partly joking. Out of billions of users it's still one in thousands.
    - obmelvin 5y ago
      Yes, relatively it is a low amount...but at first glance it feels crazy that millions would get VIP status
    - 5y ago
landemva 5y ago
US government went after Microsoft for antitrust years ago, which resulted in Bill Gates leaving MS. It's time for similar action against Facebook.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  ...and Amazon, then Netflix, then Apple, and maybe Google too.
  - annadane 5y ago
    No. Stop it with the false equivalence. Facebook is absolutely one of the worst and they need to go after them first Edit: downvotes from shills.
  - galbar 5y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what did Netflix do? I'm most certainly out of the loop here
    - emsy 5y ago
      Oh we‘re talking about antitrust, quick name all of FAANG!
    - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
      I'm not aware of any egregiously anticompetitive behavior on their part and they certainly fall well short of market dominance. Disney would be a more likely, though still unlikely, lightning rod for apparently having sold their streaming service as a "loss leader" and having purchased lots and lots of copyrights and trademarks which they subsequently made exclusive, directly causing the termination of Netflix programs in some cases.
    - dcveloper 5y ago
      It had Dave Chappelle. So it must be canceled by any means necessary. </s>
- annadane 5y ago
EE84M3i 5y ago
I believe the link to the actual report announcement is https://oversightboard.com/news/215139350722703-oversight-board-demands-more-transparency-from-facebook/ https://oversightboard.com/news/215139350722703-oversight-bo... and the actual report is at https://oversightboard.com/attachment/987339525145573/ https://oversightboard.com/attachment/987339525145573/
- alex_c 5y ago
  >Between October 2020 and the end of June 2021, Facebook and Instagram users had submitted around 524,000 cases to the Board. [...] Facebook also submitted 35 cases. >In total, the Board selected 21 cases to review and ultimately proceeded with 17 of these. By the end of June, the Board had decided 11 cases – overturning Facebook’s decision eight times and upholding it three times. >On average it took 74 days to decide and implement these cases. Wow.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    If this is a paid position, I'd like to apply for the obviously-necessary oversight board oversight board. We'd spend no less than 700 days to decide on cases, to be extra thorough.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    I wonder what happened to those four cases the board “selected” but didn’t “ultimately proceed“ with?
harryf 5y ago
> The program had mushroomed to include 5.8 million users in 2020 Interesting number. Wonder if that gives us a rough idea of the global ratio of celebrities to normal people? 8 billion people on the planet vs. 5.8 million celebs means there are on average ~ 1500 normal people for every celebrity? Seems kinda low... or that there are way too many users Facebook regards as "high profile". The ratio gets even more suspect when you remember Facebook "only" has 3 billion monthly users (src https://backlinko.com/facebook-users https://backlinko.com/facebook-users) ... 517 normal people for every celeb
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You are not counting popular animals or fake characters or tv show accounts.
titzer 5y ago
Rules for thee and not for me. It's just more of Facebook's desperate attempt to stay relevant and appease the most toxic "influencers" to keep their revenue going up and justify their absurd market valuation.
- changoplatanero 5y ago
  Facebook price/earnings is ~25. How is that an absurd market valuation? I don't think this xcheck system is designed to appease the most toxic influencers unless you consider people like Cristiano Ronaldo or Ariana Grande toxic.
  - titzer 5y ago
    P/E is meaningless because it doesn't normalize to the number of shares. What you want is the price to sales ratio, which normalizes for market cap. And yeah, tech stocks are ridiculously overinflated compared to every other sector of the economy. Facebook ranks #3 in P/S ratio even in the tech industry. So yeah, it's an absurd market valuation based on speculation of growth.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      How is P/E not normalized? IT is literally the ratio of a company's share (stock) price to the company's earnings per share
    - mrfox321 5y ago
      P/E does normalize by market cap. Earnings is actually earnings per share.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- jmspring 5y ago
  LET THEM EAT LIKES!
philistine 5y ago
Imagine there's a dude, who last year was viral for a month because of his dog or something. Now he gets into this shadow VIP group because anything he posts goes viral for a good while, but as is the case with anything viral, it dies down. Now this dude gets an easier time harassing people, breaking Facebook's rules and being a jackass on their website, just because of his damn dog. This is creepy.
- changoplatanero 5y ago
  That's not how this works. If anything he will be caught sooner because he's in xcheck.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Is the harassment an issue for you or anyone you know on facebook? Facebook seems to be setup to separate you from people who would harass you and limit you to your friends. Compared to twitter, reddit or instagram or even a blog comment section I don't see harassment as a big issue.
arresthimnow 5y ago
NIH admits Fauci lied to congress and FUNDED COVID-19 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fauci-lied-knowingly-willfully-and-brazenly-interview-dr-richard-ebright https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fauci-lied-knowingly-willf...
dthakur 5y ago
I don't like facebook the product, but I think they are being dunked on, too unfairly recently. However, I'm most amazed and impressed how facebook has created a team -- likely compensated in FB equity -- and then convinced the world that the team is an "oversight board".
- jacquesm 5y ago
  On the contrary, I think they're being treated way too lenient.
- xixixao 5y ago
  The board is not compensated in equity, nor are they employees, nor they can be fired based on their decisions. The reasons fb gets dunked on (among others) is because people in comment sections are too lazy to spend 10 seconds to Google a bit of research: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-facebooks-oversight-board-2021-05-05/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-facebooks-oversight...
  - dthakur 5y ago
    Thanks for clarifying.
    - HighPlainsDrftr 5y ago
      Their decisions are non binding though. This is probably just a dog and pony show.
imwillofficial 5y ago
This is called “plausible deniability” Their board knew, and approved.
csense 5y ago
I don't usually apologize for Facebook, but I wonder whether it might actually be a good-faith attempt by Facebook to provide good quality moderation. If having human moderation costs too much to scale to everything, do you throw up our arms and say humans will moderate nothing and it's entirely up to bots? Or do you still put some limited resources into human moderation that could check 0.1% of content, then have some algorithm that picks what content the human moderation gets applied to? If you go that route, you might be very tempted to try to design the algorithm for picking which 0.1% of content goes to the humans to try to pick "important" content. Because you want to apply your limited human moderation resources to content that's "important" to get right or will be "impactful" for large numbers of people or the trajectory of an entire society. I understand why this angers people. Facebook might see it in terms of deploying limited moderation resources in the most effective way. But suppose you're an "ordinary" person who gets posts deleted, accounts locked, etc. by bots for no discernable reason with no appeal. As an "ordinary" person, learning "important" people have a different, more forgiving justice system where actual humans make decisions is going to make you pretty angry. I'm not sure it's malicious intent on Facebook's part.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  The point here is that their oversight board needs to know about these sorts of programs, not that the program is de facto bad.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Also, the program is bad though. We know nothing about who chooses the members of the VIP club, there were cases of harassment and incitement to violence that went unchecked, and they purposely hid knowledge of the program for their own oversight board - even though they appointed the board themselves. That's all quite, quite bad, to say nothing of the base inequality at he heart of it. They tried to hand-wave that away with this absurd line, saying the program was to: > "create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding" - dude, that's just saying that their chosen VIPs deserve more understanding, for some reason; in response to serious charges that the 'VIP's were inciting violence and harassing others.
ryeights 5y ago
The entire concept of a Facebook-created "Facebook Oversight Board" is a total joke, and I cannot understand why anyone has taken it seriously ever. </story>
marricks 5y ago
I'm still amazed that anyone buys into the idea of internal oversight. At best it's a bunch of well intentioned employees who may find things and make the company more ethical who will eventually be axed by executives for doing their job (see Timnet Gebru). Useful oversight has to come from external sources, particular by those most affected by your actions. Doesn't have to be entirely cut throat but god how often do schools let kids grade their own homework? Big companies only make things like these so they can avoid external oversight. Then the Senators they buy off can say "Oh we'll step in when needed but it looks like they're trying."
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  Interestingly, I saw a TV ad from Facebook today saying they're asking Congress to establish "rules of the road" for social media companies. More about their ads and possible motivations discussed at https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2021/09/16/what-does-facebook-mean-when-it-says-it-supports-internet-regulations https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2021/09/16/what-does-fa...
sour-taste 5y ago
Why should we care what this board has to say? It's an attempt by Facebook to be bound by rules that they wrote, instead of rules written by Congress. I don't see a reason to pay them any mind.
ldbooth 5y ago
the oversight board was always a PR tactic. Zuck is the common denominator, expect more of the same bad faith and sociopathic tendencies. Scott Galloway has accurate critiques of these shenanigans.

254 points by hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

The Facebook Oversight Board sounds like a bunch of creepy silhouettes in a darkened boardroom moving pawns on a figurative chessboard.

fforflo 5y ago
"World Government" in One Piece
- suprfsat 5y ago
  "Peter Thiel" in the 2010 film The Social Network
AzzieElbab 5y ago
sounds like a bunch of people getting paid for doing nothing
- kfprt 5y ago
  Paid to lobby their friends in the media not to criticize the company too harshly. I'd say money well spent.
gadders 5y ago
It's a sinecure for failed politicians and academics.

raj2569 5y ago

VIP users looks eerie after squid games!

suprfsat 5y ago
Truly this is like an episode of black mirror.

kfprt 5y ago

In Facebook land some animals are more equal than others and their pseudo government is ineffectual because a secret program pulls all the strings. I'm sure this isn't analogous to the rest of the world.

alex_c 5y ago

>Facebook failed to provide crucial details about its "Cross-Check" program that reportedly shielded millions of VIP users from the social media platform's normal content moderation rules, according to the company's oversight board. >Facebook told the oversight board that the program applied only "to a small number of decisions," which the company subsequently acknowledged was misleading Indeed. Millions of users is a tiny fraction of Facebook's total user count, so in terms of absolute numbers it is probably a relatively small number of content. But in terms of reach and influence, I would expect the VIP users to have by far a disproportionately large share. I would also expect them to be the most likely to post content that would end up in front of an oversight board. But of course, they are also the ones most able to raise a stink if Facebook moderates their content...

barelysapient 5y ago
I guess its not much of an oversight board then! The number of accounts under the program versus not I think misses the point. Facebook has separate rules that a privileged few get to play by. So privileged in fact, that their self appointed overseers didn't in fact oversee. And these board members? What a joke. A kangaroo board. How embarrassing for those board members.
- kfprt 5y ago
  The board members were chosen for their placating potential not any governance capacity.
- fatjokes 5y ago
  Not much of a VIP either! Millions of them... I'm partly joking. Out of billions of users it's still one in thousands.
  - obmelvin 5y ago
    Yes, relatively it is a low amount...but at first glance it feels crazy that millions would get VIP status
  - 5y ago

landemva 5y ago

US government went after Microsoft for antitrust years ago, which resulted in Bill Gates leaving MS. It's time for similar action against Facebook.

smoldesu 5y ago
...and Amazon, then Netflix, then Apple, and maybe Google too.
- annadane 5y ago
  No. Stop it with the false equivalence. Facebook is absolutely one of the worst and they need to go after them first Edit: downvotes from shills.
- galbar 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what did Netflix do? I'm most certainly out of the loop here
  - emsy 5y ago
    Oh we‘re talking about antitrust, quick name all of FAANG!
  - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
    I'm not aware of any egregiously anticompetitive behavior on their part and they certainly fall well short of market dominance. Disney would be a more likely, though still unlikely, lightning rod for apparently having sold their streaming service as a "loss leader" and having purchased lots and lots of copyrights and trademarks which they subsequently made exclusive, directly causing the termination of Netflix programs in some cases.
  - dcveloper 5y ago
    It had Dave Chappelle. So it must be canceled by any means necessary. </s>
annadane 5y ago

EE84M3i 5y ago

I believe the link to the actual report announcement is https://oversightboard.com/news/215139350722703-oversight-board-demands-more-transparency-from-facebook/ https://oversightboard.com/news/215139350722703-oversight-bo... and the actual report is at https://oversightboard.com/attachment/987339525145573/ https://oversightboard.com/attachment/987339525145573/

alex_c 5y ago
>Between October 2020 and the end of June 2021, Facebook and Instagram users had submitted around 524,000 cases to the Board. [...] Facebook also submitted 35 cases. >In total, the Board selected 21 cases to review and ultimately proceeded with 17 of these. By the end of June, the Board had decided 11 cases – overturning Facebook’s decision eight times and upholding it three times. >On average it took 74 days to decide and implement these cases. Wow.
- klyrs 5y ago
  If this is a paid position, I'd like to apply for the obviously-necessary oversight board oversight board. We'd spend no less than 700 days to decide on cases, to be extra thorough.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I wonder what happened to those four cases the board “selected” but didn’t “ultimately proceed“ with?

harryf 5y ago

> The program had mushroomed to include 5.8 million users in 2020 Interesting number. Wonder if that gives us a rough idea of the global ratio of celebrities to normal people? 8 billion people on the planet vs. 5.8 million celebs means there are on average ~ 1500 normal people for every celebrity? Seems kinda low... or that there are way too many users Facebook regards as "high profile". The ratio gets even more suspect when you remember Facebook "only" has 3 billion monthly users (src https://backlinko.com/facebook-users https://backlinko.com/facebook-users) ... 517 normal people for every celeb

ipaddr 5y ago
You are not counting popular animals or fake characters or tv show accounts.

titzer 5y ago

Rules for thee and not for me. It's just more of Facebook's desperate attempt to stay relevant and appease the most toxic "influencers" to keep their revenue going up and justify their absurd market valuation.

changoplatanero 5y ago
Facebook price/earnings is ~25. How is that an absurd market valuation? I don't think this xcheck system is designed to appease the most toxic influencers unless you consider people like Cristiano Ronaldo or Ariana Grande toxic.
- titzer 5y ago
  P/E is meaningless because it doesn't normalize to the number of shares. What you want is the price to sales ratio, which normalizes for market cap. And yeah, tech stocks are ridiculously overinflated compared to every other sector of the economy. Facebook ranks #3 in P/S ratio even in the tech industry. So yeah, it's an absurd market valuation based on speculation of growth.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    How is P/E not normalized? IT is literally the ratio of a company's share (stock) price to the company's earnings per share
  - mrfox321 5y ago
    P/E does normalize by market cap. Earnings is actually earnings per share.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jmspring 5y ago
LET THEM EAT LIKES!

philistine 5y ago

Imagine there's a dude, who last year was viral for a month because of his dog or something. Now he gets into this shadow VIP group because anything he posts goes viral for a good while, but as is the case with anything viral, it dies down. Now this dude gets an easier time harassing people, breaking Facebook's rules and being a jackass on their website, just because of his damn dog. This is creepy.

changoplatanero 5y ago
That's not how this works. If anything he will be caught sooner because he's in xcheck.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ipaddr 5y ago
Is the harassment an issue for you or anyone you know on facebook? Facebook seems to be setup to separate you from people who would harass you and limit you to your friends. Compared to twitter, reddit or instagram or even a blog comment section I don't see harassment as a big issue.

arresthimnow 5y ago

NIH admits Fauci lied to congress and FUNDED COVID-19 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fauci-lied-knowingly-willfully-and-brazenly-interview-dr-richard-ebright https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fauci-lied-knowingly-willf...

dthakur 5y ago

I don't like facebook the product, but I think they are being dunked on, too unfairly recently. However, I'm most amazed and impressed how facebook has created a team -- likely compensated in FB equity -- and then convinced the world that the team is an "oversight board".

jacquesm 5y ago
On the contrary, I think they're being treated way too lenient.
xixixao 5y ago
The board is not compensated in equity, nor are they employees, nor they can be fired based on their decisions. The reasons fb gets dunked on (among others) is because people in comment sections are too lazy to spend 10 seconds to Google a bit of research: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-facebooks-oversight-board-2021-05-05/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-facebooks-oversight...
- dthakur 5y ago
  Thanks for clarifying.
  - HighPlainsDrftr 5y ago
    Their decisions are non binding though. This is probably just a dog and pony show.

imwillofficial 5y ago

This is called “plausible deniability” Their board knew, and approved.

csense 5y ago

I don't usually apologize for Facebook, but I wonder whether it might actually be a good-faith attempt by Facebook to provide good quality moderation. If having human moderation costs too much to scale to everything, do you throw up our arms and say humans will moderate nothing and it's entirely up to bots? Or do you still put some limited resources into human moderation that could check 0.1% of content, then have some algorithm that picks what content the human moderation gets applied to? If you go that route, you might be very tempted to try to design the algorithm for picking which 0.1% of content goes to the humans to try to pick "important" content. Because you want to apply your limited human moderation resources to content that's "important" to get right or will be "impactful" for large numbers of people or the trajectory of an entire society. I understand why this angers people. Facebook might see it in terms of deploying limited moderation resources in the most effective way. But suppose you're an "ordinary" person who gets posts deleted, accounts locked, etc. by bots for no discernable reason with no appeal. As an "ordinary" person, learning "important" people have a different, more forgiving justice system where actual humans make decisions is going to make you pretty angry. I'm not sure it's malicious intent on Facebook's part.

ethanbond 5y ago
The point here is that their oversight board needs to know about these sorts of programs, not that the program is de facto bad.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Also, the program is bad though. We know nothing about who chooses the members of the VIP club, there were cases of harassment and incitement to violence that went unchecked, and they purposely hid knowledge of the program for their own oversight board - even though they appointed the board themselves. That's all quite, quite bad, to say nothing of the base inequality at he heart of it. They tried to hand-wave that away with this absurd line, saying the program was to: > "create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding" - dude, that's just saying that their chosen VIPs deserve more understanding, for some reason; in response to serious charges that the 'VIP's were inciting violence and harassing others.

ryeights 5y ago

The entire concept of a Facebook-created "Facebook Oversight Board" is a total joke, and I cannot understand why anyone has taken it seriously ever. </story>

marricks 5y ago

I'm still amazed that anyone buys into the idea of internal oversight. At best it's a bunch of well intentioned employees who may find things and make the company more ethical who will eventually be axed by executives for doing their job (see Timnet Gebru). Useful oversight has to come from external sources, particular by those most affected by your actions. Doesn't have to be entirely cut throat but god how often do schools let kids grade their own homework? Big companies only make things like these so they can avoid external oversight. Then the Senators they buy off can say "Oh we'll step in when needed but it looks like they're trying."

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
Interestingly, I saw a TV ad from Facebook today saying they're asking Congress to establish "rules of the road" for social media companies. More about their ads and possible motivations discussed at https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2021/09/16/what-does-facebook-mean-when-it-says-it-supports-internet-regulations https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2021/09/16/what-does-fa...

sour-taste 5y ago

Why should we care what this board has to say? It's an attempt by Facebook to be bound by rules that they wrote, instead of rules written by Congress. I don't see a reason to pay them any mind.

ldbooth 5y ago

the oversight board was always a PR tactic. Zuck is the common denominator, expect more of the same bad faith and sociopathic tendencies. Scott Galloway has accurate critiques of these shenanigans.