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Meta Implements First Elements of Community Notes


Community Notes is they are coming to Facebook and Instagramreplacing third-party fact-checking with crowd-sourced insights into potentially misleading or false content.

And while the official launch of Meta’s Community Notes is still a few months away, we already have a glimpse of how it works, via Meta’s official announcements.

Facebook, Threads and Instagram also have it all have added a new preview option within their respective help pagesproviding more hints about upcoming functionality.

Note from the Instagram community

As you can see in this examplepublished by application researcher Alessandro PaluzziInstagram’s Community Notes view will be linked to notes that have been posted in the app.

As he explained Instagram:

We will soon introduce a new feature called Community Notes. It will allow people from different perspectives to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.

How it works

If you see a post that might be inaccurate or confusing, you can write a note with background information, advice, or insight that people might find useful. Your note may be published in a post if it is rated as useful.

Find out more

Join the waiting list to be notified if you are eligible to join the program when it becomes available.”

Meta’s version of Community Notes will work the same way notes already work on X, with a group of approved contributors empowered to review and rate proposed notes, who will then see whether or not they are displayed to users.

And just like community notes on X, notes on Meta’s posts will be displayed based on the consensus of contributors, and more importantly, will require the agreement of contributors of notes with opposing political views to meet the threshold for display.

Which was a key flaw of the X program, because people of opposing political views will simply never agree on some things.

Community Notes Report

This graph shows the claims in posts that were most often marked by Community X, but those notes were not shown due to a lack of agreement between contributors.

Not surprisingly, the research he conducted The Center for Suppression of Digital Hate (CCDH) discovered that notes on divisive political issues, such as vote rigging, never reach cross-party agreement, so they don’t appear in the app.

And this actually means that most political disinformation is not flagged by this process at all.

According to CCDH:

“We found 209 of the 283 posts in our sample to be misleading [related to the U.S. election] had accurate community notes not showing to all X users, equivalent to 74%. We rated notes as “accurate” when they are consistent with independent fact-checking, cite reputable sources, and explain why their attached post is misleading.”

So, while the cross-policy agreement variable makes sense in principle and will ensure that the notes are not used as a censorship tool to combat opposing claims, there is a flaw here that clearly affects the effectiveness of the notes in this critical area.

This is not to say that Community Notes is a bad option in general, as there are various studies that also highlight the benefits and effectiveness of the program.

Indeed, a review of 285,000 community notes conducted last year showed that the appearance of a note on a post reduces the number of retweets by almost half, while also increasing the likelihood that the post will be deleted by its author by 80%. Another study found that Notes communities have helped combat false health information in popular posts about COVID-19 vaccines.

There are clear advantages to adding annotations from the crowd, while also reducing the moderation burden on the platform itself. But if the previous Trump administration is anything to go by, we’re going to be dealing with a lot more false claims over the next four years, and the fact that Meta incorporates this cross-political element of consensus while also eliminating any other form of fact-checking seems potentially problematic.

There were also questions about the speed of Community Notes and the effectiveness of them if they were displayed quite late.

Most of the damage from such claims is often done early on, when the claim is re-shared and published, and virality allows falsehoods to spread at high speed. However, this same problem is also inherent in third-party fact-checking, as it takes time to manually review featured posts. So, while Meta should maintain a level of rapid detection and evaluation of potentially misleading claims, the issue of speed is a minor factor in comparing the two approaches.

But there are concerns about the wider use of Meta’s apps and the limitations of Community Notes to adequately deal with false claims. X has 570 million usersand it took about two years to build a network across 500,000 contributors to Community Notes.

There is a target more than 3 billion users in their applicationswhich, by comparison, would suggest that it might take a network of about 2.5 million Community Notes contributors to make this an effective, scalable option.

This will take time to build and get good contributors up to speed, while also having to filter out bad actors who will seek to infiltrate the Community Notes contributor network to de-rank notes that don’t align with their goals.

In essence, this is a huge task and it will take time for the Meta to implement it effectively. Which is why it’s somewhat surprising that Meta is planning this launch their version of Community Notes by Marchwhile the aforementioned shortcomings will mean that this is no substitute for third-party fact-checking for some time to come.

If ever.

Meta has repeatedly praised the effectiveness of its fact-checking process, and its own data shows that posts and articles rated as fake see their views through this system reduced by over 80%. Moreover, academic studies have shown this fact checks significantly reduce false beliefs.

So while Meta wastes no time implementing this new system, it seems we could be stepping into a new post-truth world, where the lessons of the past, which led to the implementation of fact-checking, are forgotten and the same mistakes are repeated once again.





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