Kayla Gogarty at MMFA:
Facebook has allowed right-wing politicians and media personalities likely covered under its cross check exemption program -- from former President Donald Trump to right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to Fox host Tucker Carlson -- to promote harmful misinformation related to COVID-19, vaccines, and the 2020 election, even though it violates Facebook policies.
On September 13, The Wall Street Journal published the first in a series of articles based on internal Facebook documents. According to the reporting, the program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was “initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists.” But the program grew to include at least 5.8 million users in 2020 -- “pretty much anyone regularly in the media or who has a substantial online following, including film stars, cable talk-show hosts, academics and online personalities with large followings” -- and it protected public figures who used the platform for harassment or incitement of violence.
This reporting on the program underscores a recurring problem at Facebook. The company consistently prioritizes public opinion and press coverage over actions addressing its problems. Among other things, this approach manifests in capitulation and preferential treatment to right-wing pages to avoid unsubstantiated claims that it is censoring right-wing accounts. (Media Matters and others have demonstrated again and again that no such bias or censorship exists. In fact, some right-wing personalities who post sensational and misleading content earned significantly more engagement in 2020 and 2021 than in previous years.)
For standard users, posts that incite violence or contain misleading content are considered violations of the platform’s policy. For high profile users, Facebook often delayed action on such content or didn't take it at all. Some were even given “whitelist” status, offering blanket exemptions from enforcement. And in some cases, Facebook even asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts.
Media Matters has identified numerous harmful and misleading posts -- and others that also appear to violate Facebook’s policies -- from right-wing politicians and media personalities who were likely covered under Facebook’s XCheck program. They include Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Republican members of Congress, and right-wing media personalities Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, Dan Bongino, Tucker Carlson, and Terrence K. Williams.
Facebook continues to give leeway to prominent right-wing media personalities and politicians such as Dan Bongino, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ben Shapiro to promote misinformation... all to appease conservative who scream "we're being silenced."
