After Axing Fact-Checkers, Meta's Community Notes Will Have Help From X
Meta will begin testing its Community Notes feature-a crowdsourcing approach to content moderation that invites users to add context to posts and rate other users' notes-on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, beginning on March 18, the company said.
The regime not only mimics X's Community Notes, originally launched in 2019 under the name Birdwatch, but will operate on open-source software developed by X.
"Initially we will use X's open source algorithm as the basis of our rating system. This will allow us to build on what X has created and improve it for our own platforms over time," the company wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Meta plans to gather feedback and "learn from the researchers who have studied" X's tech to make algorithmic adjustments as needed on a rolling basis.
The changes come just two months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social giant would eliminate third-party human fact-checking roles en masse to "reduce censorship" and "[go] back to its roots."
Meta Scraps Third-Party Fact-Checking For X-like Community Notes. Some Claim It's Gone 'Full MAGA'
Meta Scraps Third-Party Fact-Checking For X-like Community Notes. Some Claim It's Gone 'Full MAGA'
While Meta acknowledges that Community Notes won't serve as a "perfect" approach to content moderation, the company said it expects the product to be "less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces."
In an effort to mitigate bias, the company won't publish notes unless contributors with a variety of viewpoints generally agree with them. Notes won't indicate who authored them.
But there are concerns about the efficacy of such a system. Research published in October 2024 by The Washington Post and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that most Community Notes on X never appear, due to the system's requirement for bipartisan agreement. 74% of accurate notes-those aligning with independent fact-checks-were not shown to users, according to the study, even as misleading election-related posts amassed 2.9 billion views.
Meta first introduced fact-checking in December 2016, following backlash over dissemination of misinformation on the platform that may have influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Approximately 200,000 users across Meta's properties have signed up in advance to act as potential contributors to the system, and the company is encouraging more users to join a waitlist.
The company will begin testing Community Notes in beta this month and will roll out the system nationally once Meta is "comfortable … that the program is working in broadly the way we believe it should."
Notes will be made available in the U.S. market in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese, with plans to expand into other languages in the future.
A global rollout is also slated, with third-party fact-checking continuing outside the U.S. for now.
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