San Francisco (AFP)

A Facebook program allows certain celebrities, politicians and Internet users to not have to obey the same rules on moderation of content as the rest of the users, the Wall Street Journal said Monday.

Called "Crosscheck" or "XCheck", this program does not apply the same checks to the messages posted on the Facebook and Instagram accounts of these "VIP" as on the lambda accounts, assures the economic daily, citing internal documents at the business.

It included up to 5.8 million subscribers in 2020. Some are exempt from the rules while others may post messages theoretically violating the instructions while waiting for a Facebook employee to review them.

This does not mean that there are "two systems of justice" within the group, retorted Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook, in a series of tweets.

If some pages or accounts receive a second layer of verification, it is to ensure that the rules are being implemented appropriately and "to avoid errors," he said.

"We know that the application of our rules is not perfect and that there are trade-offs between speed and precision," he admitted.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, Facebook for example allowed football star Neymar in 2019 to show his millions of subscribers nude photos of a woman who accused him of rape, before deleting them. .

The group has also reportedly let some accounts share claims deemed false by Facebook factcheckers, including that vaccines kill, which Hillary Clinton covered with so-called pedophile rings, or which ex-President Donald Trump called off. '"animals" all asylum seekers.

For the supervisory board of the company, the implementation of special measures on the moderation of content is embarrassing.

This body "has repeatedly expressed its concern about the lack of transparency in Facebook's content moderation processes, in particular with regard to the company's inconsistent management of the most prominent accounts," said the door. - speech of this body, supposed to be independent but financed by the group.

In a post from three years ago, the company ensured that checking certain content a second time did not prevent the account, page or post from being removed but did ensure that any this decision was "taken correctly".

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