Facebook’s VIP ‘Whitelist’ Reveals Two Big Problems

Facebook has a couple big problems when it comes to filtering out the often misleading and dangerous stuff that users post on the social network. First, its artificial intelligence doesn’t work. Second, the company doesn’t want to admit this, because hiring humans to do proper moderation would undermine its business model. The combination should have legislators and shareholders very worried.

An investigation by Jeff Horwitz at The Wall Street Journal has shed new light on Facebook’s duplicity: Even as executives publicly claimed that their automated moderation was applying the same rules to all users, the company was actually giving special treatment to celebrities and politicians. Such “whitelisted” accounts were handled by humans, who allowed inflammatory and misleading posts that algorithms otherwise would have censored — including a call to violence from then-President Donald Trump.