Meta announced that it will begin testing community notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as a replacement to its former “fact-checking” system as early as next week.
“On March 18th, we will begin testing this new approach by allowing contributors from our community to write and rate notes on content” across the social media platforms, Meta said.
“We’re going to take time to do this right. Around 200,000 potential contributors in the US have signed up so far across all three apps, and the waitlist remains open for those who wish to take part in the program. But notes won’t initially appear on content,” the company explained. “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 new system mirrors the community notes used by X, where users add context to posts.
“Meta won’t decide what gets rated or written – contributors from our community will,” the company added. “And to safeguard against bias, notes won’t be published unless contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them.”
Instead of “reinventing the wheel,” Meta described, it will “use X’s open source algorithm as the basis of our rating system,” building upon it for its own platforms. “As our own version develops, we may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated.”
Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that Meta was going to “focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
He explained that fact-checkers have become “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.”
