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Meta (META-3.87%) is rolling out community notes on March 18, taking a page from the playbook of Elon Musk’s X.
The incoming feature will ask users to fact-check or clarify claims in popular posts, marking a departure from Meta’s former fact-checking system, which relied on fact-checking experts.
“We won’t be reinventing the wheel. Initially we will use X’s open-source algorithm as the basis of our rating system,” Meta said in a press release on Thursday.
Twitter introduced community notes under the name Birdwatch in 2021, well before Musk bought the service and rebranded it as X. Users on X already rank other users’ notes, and the most popular response appears directly below posts.
Meta said it will launch its similar feature on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, but only within the United States for now. The company eventually intends to roll out the new system globally. Meta added that user-submitted notes won’t actually appear beneath posts until it thinks its system is working properly.
Meta first announced that it would retire its third-party fact-checking program in January. At the time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would replace it with community notes, similar to X, without giving much detail.
Meta’s third-party fact-checking program started in 2016, shortly after President Donald Trump won his first election. At the time, Facebook faced criticism for failing to catch election-related misinformation on the platform, including disinformation campaigns led by foreign governments.
“We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces, and to operate at a greater scale when it is fully up and running,” the company said in the press release, saying the experts in the earlier fact-checking program had political biases that affected their judgement.
“Community Notes allow more people with more perspectives to add context to more types of content, and because publishing a note requires agreement between different people, we believe it will be less prone to bias,” Meta said.
Separately, Zuckerberg has said the change could also mean that Meta is “going to catch less bad stuff,” per ABC.
Meta’s community notes also won’t have penalties associated with them. Under the earlier system, posts that received third-party fact-checking intervention were shown less often on people’s feeds, due to them potentially harboring false and harmful information. That won’t be the case with posts that receive community notes.
But X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking has also been deemed ill-equipped for handling misinformation. Reports have found that accurate notes on misleading posts were not displayed 100% of the time, and even when they were, the original post got significantly more views than the correcting note.
Meta shared that around 200,000 users have signed up to become Community Notes contributors so far across all three apps, and the waitlist is still open for those who wish to take part. The feature will be available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese to start before expanding to other languages with time.