Facebook Is Rebuked by Oversight Board

The board, which Facebook created to provide guidance about the company’s enforcement systems and make binding decisions about specific enforcement actions, said the company had failed to mention XCheck when it referred its decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform to the board this spring. The company only gave limited detail when asked directly about it by the board. Facebook’s public disclosures about the program made at the board’s recommendation at the time were insufficient, the board said.

“The fact that Facebook provided such an ambiguous, undetailed response to a call for greater transparency is not acceptable,” the board wrote in its report.

The oversight board’s investigation into the XCheck program was spurred by the first of a series of articles in the Journal based in part on internal documents showing the company is aware of ways its systems are causing harm, but has often played those issues down in public.

That article described how the XCheck system, initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, had grown to include millions of accounts. A 2019 internal Facebook review found that the practice of whitelisting was “not publicly defensible,” according to documents viewed by the Journal.

Write to Sam Schechner at [email protected]