• by Colin Kirkland , April 17, 2025

TikTok is now testing “Footnotes” -- its own version of user-sourced contextual notes on in-app posts.

In line with Meta's recent decision to adopt X’s controversial crowdsourced moderation approach, Footnotes “will draw on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content” on the ByteDance-owned platform, the company says.

Unlike on X, and eventually Meta, TikTok's community notes feature will supplement -- not replace -- existing content-moderation practices.

“It will add to our suite of measures that help people understand the reliability of content and access authoritative sources, including our content labels, search banners, our fact-checking program, and more,” TikTok explains.

The platform says it will still target harmful and inappropriate content through its current suite of integrity measures and features, such as its partnerships with over 20 accredited third-party fact-checking organizations, which police in-app content in over 60 languages across 130 global markets.

Footnotes are designed to fill in the gaps in official moderation by providing users with more individual power to flag content issues via a “bridge-based ranking system” dependent on the agreement between people who usually have different opinions, TikTok says.

“It works by allowing contributors with differing opinions to leave and vote on the helpfulness of a footnote,” TikTok says. “Only footnotes that meet the threshold for ‘helpful’ will be visible to the community, at which point the broader community can vote on it, too.”

In various reports and studies, the necessity to agree on a note in order for it to be shown is what makes crowdsourced content moderation potentially unreliable and ineffective.

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), for example, 73% of Community Notes related to political topics on X are never displayed, although they are providing reliable context. Another study conducted in February by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita found that 85% of all Community Notes are never displayed to X users.

Regardless, with TikTok's future still uncertain in the U.S., it is worth noting that President Donald Trump is in favor of the community notes moderation model, which directly influenced Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to announce the end of third-party fact-checking on Meta's social platforms.

Right now, TikTok is only testing Footnotes in the U.S. in a move that is likely kowtowing to the wishes of Trump, who may decide the fate of the platform's existence for 170 million Americans.