Meta’s Secret Cross Check Program: Report to the Board of Supervisors, and how it was subsequently shut down by the Oversight Board
The topic at hand was Meta’s controversial Cross Check program, which gave special treatment to posts from certain powerful users—celebrities, journalists, government officials, and the like. For years this program operated in secret, and Meta even misled the board on its scope. When details of the program were leaked to The Wall Street Journal, it became clear that millions of people received that special treatment, meaning their posts were less likely to be taken down when reported by algorithms or other users for breaking rules against things like hate speech. The aim was to avoid mistakes in cases where Meta would be embarrassed because of the speaker’s prominence. Internal documents showed that Meta researchers had qualms about the project’s propriety. Meta asked the Board to take a look at the program and recommend what the company should do with it.
The meeting I witnessed was part of that reckoning. The board’s tone made me wonder if it would suggest that Meta shut down the program in order to be fair. The policies need to be for everyone. one board member cried out.
That did not happen. The Oversight Board finally delivered its Cross Check report, which had been delayed due to foot-dragging by Meta, as the social media world stopped laughing at Musk’s content-moderation train wreck. The board never received a list of those who were given special permission to prevent the post from being taken down. The conclusions were not kind. The board determined that the program was more about protecting the company’s interests than improving the quality of its content decisions. Meta never set up processes to monitor the program and assess whether it was fulfilling its mission. The lack of transparency to the outside world was appalling. Finally, all too often Meta failed to deliver the quick personalized action that was the reason those posts were spared quick takedowns. There were too many cases for Meta to deal with. They frequently remained up for days before being given secondary consideration.
The prime example, featured in the original WSJ report, was a post from Brazilian soccer star Neymar, who posted a sexual image without its subject’s consent in September 2019. Because of the special treatment he got from being in the Cross Check elite, the image—a flagrant policy violation—garnered over 56 million views before it was finally removed. The program to reduce the impact of mistake in content decision was a flop.
The board didn’t recommend shutting down Cross Check. Instead, it called for an overhaul. The reasons are in no way an endorsement of the program but an admission of the devilish difficulty of content moderation. The subtext of the Oversight Board’s report was the hopelessness of believing it was possible to get things right. Meta, like other platforms that give users voice, had long emphasized growth before caution and hosted huge volumes of content that would require huge expenditures to police. Meta does spend many millions on moderation—but still makes millions of errors. It’s better to cut down on the mistakes than it is to invest in them. The idea of Cross Check is to minimize the error rate on posts from the most important or prominent people. When a celebrity or statesman used its platform to speak to millions, Meta didn’t want to screw up.
How the “Twitter Files” Are Disturbed by Conservatives, and Why Social Media Should Not Be Forbids Political Phenomena
As Musk tries to change the platform in his image, internal documents from his previous leadership have been released. The billionaire has previously said he wants to do away with permanent user bans and Twitter has recently begun to restore the accounts of thousands of users, including some incendiary figures. But Musk has also said he doesn’t want Twitter to “become a free-for-all hellscape” and plans to moderate content in a way that appears largely consistent with Twitter’s prior policies.
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
Over the past two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a handpicked group of journalists who are digging through them and posting excerpts on Twitter.
A week ago, on the company’s website, we were told that it had not changed its policies, but rather that its approach to enforcement would rely heavily on de-amplification of violative accounts, which it already does. The post stated that the freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.
Musk and his allies promote these tweet threads – dubbed the “Twitter Files” – as bombshell revelations proving that Twitter intentionally muzzled conservatives because of their political views. That’s a long-running claim by Republicans who are convinced social media companies censor them, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Twitter’s internal researchers have found that the company’s algorithms favor right-leaning political content.
The debate among several employees, including several top executives, was revealed in the latest edition of the “theTwitter Files,” a collection of internal company documents given to and published by several journalists. The releases so far have focused on some of the social media company’s most high-profile, and controversial, content moderation decisions.
Weiss suggested that such actions were taken “all without users’ knowledge.” The fact that it may limit certain content that violates its policies and that it may apply “strikes” that correspond with suspensions for accounts that violate its rules have been transparent for a long time. When strikes occur, users receive notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended.
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In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.
Weiss said several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it was not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.
A series of internal Twitter documents shared on the social media platform Monday offer a glimpse into internal debates among some of the company’s employees ahead of its decision to ban then-President Donald Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
There was a debate among employees about what to do with the most controversial user of the social networking site, after Donald Trump was banned from it.
In a slack message about Trump’s January 8th proposal to make America First and Making America Great Again, Anika said: “I also am not seeing clear or code words for violence.” They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
On January 6, when the House committee investigated, INRDeals INRDeals testified that she and other staffers were alarmed by the Proud Boys and other groups’ posts on social media and worried about the potential for violence ahead of the attack.
Another staffer, whose name was removed in the screenshot, said in Slack that a subsequent tweet that day from Trump saying he would not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration was also “a clear no vio[lation].” But a different staffer questioned whether that tweet could be “proof that [Trump] doesn’t support a peaceful transition,” according to Weiss’ tweets.
“This is how the whole process went … this is not really out of the ordinary,” one former Twitter executive told CNN, noting that the various teams involved in content decisions would push each other to consider context and information they might not have thought of as they worked through how to handle difficult issues. “I think these conversations look like people were trying to be really thoughtful and careful,” the former executive said.
Twitter ultimately said at the time of Trump’s ban that his tweet about American patriots suggested that “he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election,” and that the tweet concerning the inauguration could be viewed as a further statement that the election was not legitimate or that the inauguration would be a “safe” target for violence because he would not be attending.
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But many tech journalists, social media experts and former Twitter employees say Musk’s claims are over-hyped, given that the documents shared so far largely corroborate what is already known about the messy business of policing a large social network.
Renée DiResta is a research manager at theStanford Internet Observatory who studies how narratives spread on social networks, and she said that people who are confronting high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how will be coming through in the retweeted files for her.
The Musk gave exclusive access to a small group of independent journalists including Matt Taibbi who used to write for Rolling Stone and Bari Weiss, who used to write for the New York Times.
They show Twitter executives and rank and file employees grappling with difficult tradeoffs, questioning the company’s rules and how they should be applied – and in some cases, getting things wrong.
Before the 2020 presidential election, a New York Post story that was about shady business dealings by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was blocked from being shared on the social networking site.
The article was based on files from the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Biden, which was given to the Post by Trump’s private attorney Rudy Giuliani. It wasn’t clear if that material was authentic at the time. The possibility of a repeat of the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails caused tech companies to be on edge and that is why Twitter restricted the Post story.
Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, the company showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. Facebook was alarmed by the article, too, but it wasn’t as far as Twitter. While it allowed the link to be posted, it limited the distribution of posts while fact-checkers looked at the claims.
Sometimes the process does not yield the right result. The company may not have made the right call in how to handle the New York post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. And Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey reiterated in an online post Tuesday that he believes the company acted wrongly in removing Trump’s account.
And it does not show any evidence that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.
He continued: “I don’t think there was a hidden agenda and everyone acted according to the best information we knew at the time.” Mistakes were made.
He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”
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DiResta said there’s a good reason to demand more information on how social media companies operate. She said that decisions are often inscrutable. The design and moderated nature of these platforms shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re designed is important.
She said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than Musk’s journalists are sharing, which so far has focused only on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.
To better understand the decision to ban Trump, for example, it would help to see discussions around the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, she said.
“There’s value in what’s been revealed, but it’s also reinforcing a perception of you as a partisan person within the United States, and that’s why it’s important,” said DiResta.
Mike Caulfield is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an informed public.
Over the weekend, Musk smeared Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, who features prominently in the documents, with homophobic tropes common in anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. He also attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Musk says will feature in future installments of the Twitter files, with a tweet amplifying a conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 pandemic.
His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. A person with knowledge of the situation says that the family has been forced to flee their home.
“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. You can direct the blame at me or my actions.
He has made deep cuts to the company’s trust and safety workforce, including teams focused on non-English languages and state-backed propaganda operations. This week, Twitter disbanded its external Trust and Safety Council, some of whose members had come under online attack after Musk criticized them.
One Trust and Safety Council member requested anonymity because of concerns of retaliation, as they say the CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform safe is creating a chilling effect.
Musk has hijacked the discussion thanks to his gleeful and consistent releases of the files from the company’s past.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor
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“It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,'” DiResta said.
“There’s no decision that’s cost free,” said Matt Perault, tech policy consultant and professor at University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science. The challenge is that any decision that social media companies make, including the decision not to act, will have consequences and they need to figure out which consequences they are comfortable with.
The right thing for the public company business at that time was the wrong thing for the internet and society, as he wrote, but he continued to believe there was no ill intent. Mistakes were made.
The co-founder of social media platforms had called for a drastic change to the way social media works in a Tuesday night post. The company has become too powerful, said the man who runs the company. He is pushing for the growth of social media that is not controlled by any single entity and where users are free to choose their own moderation.