Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s upcoming Community Notes feature for monitoring misinformation through crowdsourcing will use some technology developed by Elon Musk’s X for its similar service.
On Thursday, Meta revealed in a blog post more details of its new content moderation tool, and said it incorporates the same open-source algorithm that powers X’s Community Notes. Meta said that over time it plans to modify the algorithm to better serve its Facebook, Instagram and Threads apps.
“As X’s algorithm and program information is open source — meaning free and available for anyone to use— we can build on what X has done, learn from the researchers who have studied it, and improve the system for our own platforms,” Meta said in the post. “As our own version develops, we may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitched Community Notes in January as the company’s preferred replacement in the U.S. for third-party fact-checking, which he shuttered as part of a broader policy change that also relaxed certain content moderation guidelines. The company will begin testing Community Notes next week in the U.S. Last month, Meta said that users can apply to become contributors as long as they meet certain requirements, including being over 18 and having a verified phone number.
Contributors will not be able to submit Community Notes on advertisements, but will be able to do so on “almost any other forms of content, including posts by Meta, our executives, politicians and other public figures,” the blog post said. Posts hit with Community Notes can’t be appealed, but there’s also no additional penalty for content that’s flagged.
“Notes will provide extra context, but they won’t impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared,” the blog post said.
A Meta spokesperson told CNBC in an email that Community Notes is not a replacement for content moderation.
Meta doesn’t plan to open source or publicly release more technical details about its Community Notes system, but is considering the option for the future, Rachel Lambert, director of product management at Meta, said in a media briefing.
So far, about 200,000 people have signed up to become Community Notes contributors “and the waitlist remains open for those who wish to take part in the program,” the company’s blog post said.
Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physics professor and expert in how misinformation and hate speech spread online, told CNBC in February that a Community Notes program can help provide context for online content, but is not a substitute for “formal fact-checking.”
Johnson characterized a Community Notes model as an “imperfect system” that can potentially be exploited by large groups or organizations with their own agendas.
Meta said in the blog post that “publishing a note requires agreement between different people,” a policy that helps “safeguard against organized campaigns attempting to game the system and influence what notes get published or what they say.”
The company said the model will be expanded across the country “once we are comfortable from the initial beta testing that the program is working in broadly the way we believe it should, though we will continue to learn and improve it as we go.”
