Facebook Asks Oversight Board for Guidance on How It Regulates High-Profile Users

The Oversight Board last week said it was reviewing the company’s practice of holding high-profile users to separate sets of rules, citing apparent inconsistencies in the way the social-media giant makes decisions.

“We know the system isn’t perfect,”

Nick Clegg,

the company’s vice president for global affairs said in a blog post Tuesday.

The request to the Oversight Board follows a directive Monday by Florida Republican

Gov. Ron DeSantis

to his secretary of state to investigate the company in relation to the Journal’s reporting on the social-media giant’s XCheck program.

The XCheck program was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. It grew to include millions of accounts, according to documents viewed by the Journal. In addition, some users are “whitelisted,” meaning they were rendered immune from enforcement actions, the documents showed.

Facebook on Monday also said it would suspend plans for a version of its Instagram app tailored to children, a concession after lawmakers and others voiced concerns about the photo-sharing platform’s effects on young people’s mental health. That move followed another article this month in the Journal’s Facebook Files series showing that the company’s internal research found Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of young users, particularly teenage girls with body-image concerns.

Mr. Clegg said Facebook wants the Oversight Board to provide guidance on the criteria that it should use to determine what is prioritized for a secondary review via the XCheck program and how best to manage it. The company said billions of pieces of content are posted to its platforms daily, and while it has sophisticated technology and tens of thousands of human reviewers, mistakes are inevitable.

“Over the coming weeks and months, we will continue to brief the board on our cross-check system and engage with them to answer their questions,” Mr. Clegg said. He added that the company already had taken measures to improve XCheck based on a prior Oversight Board recommendation by describing the system in its transparency reporting.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]