According to the firm, on March 18, Meta will start testing its Community Notes feature on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. This crowdsourced method of content moderation allows users to rate other users’ notes and provide context to posts.
In addition to imitating X’s Community Notes, which were first introduced in 2019 under the name Birdwatch, the regime will run on open-source software that X created.
“At first, our rating system will be based on X’s open source methodology. This will enable us to expand upon X’s work and enhance it for our own platforms in the future,” the business stated in a blog post published on Thursday.
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On a rolling basis, Meta intends to collect input and “learn from the researchers who have studied” X’s technology in order to make algorithmic changes as necessary.
Only two months have passed since Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, declared that the social media behemoth would “reduce censorship” and “[go] back to its roots” by mass-firing third-party human fact-checking positions.
Meta stated that it anticipates Community Notes to be “less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces,” even if it admits the tool won’t be a “perfect” method of content management.
The organization will not publish notes unless authors across a range of perspectives largely concur with them in an attempt to reduce bias. The author will not be identified in the notes.
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However, there are questions on how effective such a system would be. Because the system requires bipartisan agreement, the majority of Community Notes on X never appear, according to research published in October 2024 by The Washington Post and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. As false election-related posts accumulated 2.9 billion views, the study found that 74% of accurate notes—those that matched independent fact-checks—were not displayed to viewers.
In response to criticism regarding the spread of false material on the platform that might have affected the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Meta first implemented fact-checking in December 2016.
About 200,000 people from all of Meta’s properties have already registered to serve as potential system contributors, and the business is urging other users to sign up for a waitlist.
After Meta is “comfortable … that the program is working in broadly the way we believe it should,” the business will launch Community Notes nationwide. Beta testing will start this month.
English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Portuguese will be the languages in which notes are offered for sale in the United States, with hopes to add more languages later.
Additionally, a worldwide deployment is planned, with third-party fact-checking currently ongoing outside of the United States.
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