Meta is introducing a few new features for its crowdsourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, launched in the U.S. earlier this year. Now users will be notified when they’ve interacted with a post on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads that receives a Community Note. Plus, anyone can now request a note or rate a note if it’s been helpful to them.
The company says these features are considered “tests” at present. Meta CISO Guy Rosen shared on X that since the system’s launch, over 70,000 contributors have written 15,000 notes, only 6% of which were published. For a market like the U.S. with hundreds of millions of users across platforms, that’s still a small drop in the bucket.
Meta’s Community Notes system mimics the one Twitter (now called X) first unveiled in 2021. The latter has been criticized by researchers for failing to flag misinformation in a timely fashion and at scale, leaving some to wonder whether Meta’s alternative will fare any better. Like X’s program, Community Notes are added to a post when different users who typically share opposing viewpoints reach consensus, even if that spans their current ideological lines, political or otherwise.
While this system can help to highlight misinformation and misleading posts, like those lacking further context, critics point out that it can sometimes be hard to achieve that necessary consensus. Nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which advocates for digital rights, has pointed out that misinformation can spread virally before it’s corrected. It cited one study that found that more than 70% of accurate notes related to U.S. election misinformation were never shown to users.
The organization also questioned whether this type of system would work well in highly visual environments like Instagram and Reels, or how well it could penetrate private silos on Facebook, like Groups. It suggested that Meta should add measurements that show how many people see the corrected information and make Notes data available publicly for increased transparency. It pushed the company to also reconsider its decision to end fact-checking on the platform.
