• by Colin Kirkland , February 21, 2025

Despite the concern of its own Safety Council over Meta's decision to replace its longstanding fact-checking program for a controversial user-based content-moderation approach called Community Notes, the tech giant is pushing ahead, sharing a vague overview of the forthcoming feature.

Shortly after President Donald Trump was re-elected, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be eliminating its fact-checking program and integrating Community Notes across its flagship platforms – raising widespread concern among users, especially those in underrepresented communities.

Similar to X's model, Meta says its Community Notes approach will allow users to “add more context to posts that are confusing or potentially misleading” by writing and submitting a note “with background information, a tip or an insight that people might find useful.”

“Contributors will be able to write and submit notes on most public content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads,” Meta notes on a new mini-site. “Notes must be under 500 characters and include a link.”

To be a contributor to Community Notes – which Meta says will be beta testing in the next few months -- users must be over 18 years old, have an account more than 6 months old, have a verified phone number and be based in the U.S.

However, in its description, Meta avoids explaining how the feature will effectively replace its fact-checking approach, especially when it comes to flagging and combatting misinformation, as well as protecting users who are more susceptible to hate speech.

With Meta's massive global reach, the company's third-party Safety Council believes that Meta sets a standard for not only online behavior but societal norms, and could potentially normalize harmful behaviors by dialing back protections for protected communities, ultimately “undermining years of social progress.”

One potential issue with the effectiveness of Community Notes points to the need for people with opposing beliefs and perspectives to agree on a note's validity.

“Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Meta said upon its initial announcement last month.

“Notes will not be added to content when there is no agreement or when people agree a Note is not helpful,” the company added.

With an increasingly polarized population, especially politically, it seems more than likely that a vast number of Community Notes will never be displayed based on the possibility that users with conflicting beliefs will not be able to agree on the necessity of a note.

If a note is not agreed upon, and the content is harmful and/or misleading, then it could remain on Meta's largest platforms, which serve almost a third of the world's population.

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), 73% of Community Notes related to political topics on X are never displayed, although they are providing reliable context.

Furthermore, X's Community Notes feature has been infiltrated by groups of contributors who strategically collaborate to up and downvote notes based on their communal ideologies, throwing off the effectiveness of the feature.

This week, X-owner Elon Musk, who ushered in the age of Community Notes after clearing out the platform’s content moderation team, wrote in a post that the feature “is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.”

Musk said he would “fix” this issue only after a poll surfaced on the app that disproved Trump's recent statement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a low approval rating.

Musk provided no evidence to support his claim, then deleted his post.

Meta has opened its waitlist for future Community Notes contributors.