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.

Facebook said it will ask 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—which was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts—and how best to manage the program. 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]