Meta gives VIP users unfair advantage, oversight board concludes

Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss Meta's oversight board concluding that Facebook has an unfair bias toward VIP users.

Video transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: The Oversight Board for Meta has concluded that the platform's Cross-Check program has an unfair bias towards VIP users, saying that it failed to make clear which accounts are protected by special status and also criticized the company for not keeping track of statistics that would help assess the accuracy of the program. I guess, just stack this right up there with Twitter on just user concerns.

BRAD SMITH: Well, they said that within the report, Cross-Check is currently neither designed nor implemented in a manner that actually meets Meta's human rights responsibilities and company values as well here. And this was a program that had started back in 2019, I believe, too.

And so with some of the internal review that they've been moving forward with some of their own kind of saving face, and this was even prior to Meta really making some of the more strategic branding decisions, too, about how it would like to be thought about among consumer in the ranks there. But again, trying to make sure that end users feel like there is a safer platform that they're engaging with, but still, I think--

JULIE HYMAN: Well, the problem here is they weren't treating everyone equally. That's the bottom line. The people who were the super users for famous people, celebrities, whatever kinds of VIPs on the platform, were not subject to the same regulations that everybody else was subject to when it came to content moderation. That seems to be what was at issue here. They didn't name who those people were, by the way, which is quite interesting.

[BUZZER]

All right.