Taking a page out of X’s book, Meta announced on Thursday that it would start testing Community Notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in the United States on March 18.
Meta offered implied criticism of “third-party” fact checkers, on whom it had heretofore relied, writing, “We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces because it allows more people with more perspectives to add context to posts.”
Meta announced in January it would move to a community notes-based approach, stating, “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.”
“Notes won’t initially appear on content,” Meta warned. “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.”
Meta acknowledged its debt to X, explaining, “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Meta stated it would guard against bias in the notes by ensuring the notes would not be published unless “contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them. This isn’t majority rules. No matter how many contributors agree on a note, it won’t be published unless people who normally disagree decide that it provides helpful context.”
The notes are limited to 500 characters and require a link to support them. Contributors must be over 18 with an “account that’s more than 6 months old and in good standing, and either have a verified phone number or be enrolled in two-factor authentication.”
