It was the first day of April 2022, and I was sitting in a law firm’s midtown Manhattan conference room at a meeting of Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body the scrutinizes its content decisions. And for a few minutes, it seemed that despair had set in.
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,
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