Meta to Begin Testing Community Notes Feature on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads
Meta has announced that it will begin testing a community notes feature on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in the US on March 18, adopting an approach similar to that used by X.
In January, Meta revealed its decision to transition from a fact-checking system to a community-notes-based model. “Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model. We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations. We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can,” the company stated.
Meta cautioned that notes would not initially appear on content. “We will start by gradually and randomly admitting people off of the waitlist, and will take time to test the writing and rating system before any notes are published publicly,” the company said.
The company has argued that community notes will be “less biased” than the third-party fact-checking program it has used, claiming that allowing a broader range of perspectives will add better context to posts.
“Many of you will be familiar with X’s Community Notes system, in which users add context to posts. That’s the broad approach we are adopting. … 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,” Meta explained.
The company emphasized that the feature would not function as a “majority rules” system and that community notes would only be added if “contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them.”
In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he stated that X has a superior fact-checking system. The move to community notes appears to be part of Zuckerberg’s broader efforts to counter the perception that Meta’s platforms engage in more censorship than others.
