Meta is introducing several new features for Community Notes, a crowdsourcing fact-checking program launched in the US earlier this year. Now users will be notified when they interact with a Facebook, Instagram, or thread post that receives community notes. Plus, everyone can request a note or rate notes if it helps.
The company says these features are now considered “tests.” Meta Ciso Guy Rosen shares that at X, more than 70,000 contributors have written 15,000 notes since the launch of the system, with only 6% of them being published. For a market like the US, which has hundreds of millions of users on the platform, it’s still a slight drop in buckets.
Meta’s Community Notes System mimics one Twitter (now called X) first published in 2021. The latter has been criticized for flagging misinformation in a timely manner and not flagging it on a massive scale, and some wonder if the meta alternative will be better. Like X’s program, community notes are added to posts when different users who share normal perspectives reach consensus, even if they span the lines of political or other current ideological ideology.
The system helps to highlight misinformation and misleading posts, like those lacking further context, but critics point out that it can be difficult to achieve that necessary consensus. The non-profit Center for Democracy Technology (CDT), advocating for digital rights, points out that misinformation could spread to the virus before it is corrected. It cited one study that found that over 70% of the exact notes related to US election misinformation were never shown to users.
The organization also questioned whether this type of system works well in highly visual environments such as Instagram and reels, or whether it could infiltrate private silos on Facebook like groups. Meta suggested that note data would be made publicly available for more transparency by adding measurements that show how many people are viewing the revised information. It also prompted the company to reconsider its decision to end fact-checking on the platform.
