What is Community Notes? How does it work? With Meta removing fact-check — all you need to know explained

Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO of Meta Platforms on January 7, announced the company's pivot from professional fact-checking of content to reliance on “Community Notes” type crowdsourced features for posts. And with that came a variety of responses — negative, positive and memes. The change will be applicable across Meta's platforms including Facebook and Instagram.

Community Notes is a feature kick-started by Elon Musk's X (formerly known as Twitter), where users sign up to rate and write notes on posts offering a wide range of perspectives. Overall, the exercise has had mixed results.

Facebook, Instagram to Adopt ‘Community Notes’

Zuckerberg in his blog post said the feature as he envisions for Meta's platforms would empower the community to “decide when posts are potentially misleading”. It would replace Facebook's current fact-checking programme, which operates in 26 languages and works with over 80 media organisations around the world, according to an AFP report.

So, as the feature becomes more mainstream and makes it entrance to platforms besides X, we take a deep dive into what it means and how it functions.

What are Community Notes?

As it works on X, community notes appear on a post when a user applies to add context to a post that may either be — misleading, missing context, or needs more explanation. It appears below a post with the tag: ‘Readers added context’ and can have a sentence or reasoning explaining the need for an extended note. Readers also usually add source links to support their case and other X users can vote on whether the added context is needed or can be removed.

Community Notes pre-dates Twitter's Musk-era, being introduced in 2021 as ‘Birdwatch’. Under Musk it has been expanded to users in 44 countries.

How Do Community Notes Function?

X users must sign up to Community Notes feature on the social media platform and before writing notes must first rate other user's notes — help make a collective decision on which note stays and which is not required.

Once allowed to write notes, users may lose the privilige if their contributions are regularly rated as ‘unhelpful’.

How Does Rating for Community Notes Work?

According to X, it is not a simple matter of majority choice. The algorithm considers agreement between raters who have disagreed in the past to reduce what its calls “manipulation”.

However, one may find posts on X bombarded with community notes for no other reason than diverging points of view rather than facts-based reasons.

What impact have Community Notes had?

According to the AFP report, there is little conclusive scientific analysis available of Community Notes' effectiveness. As per an April 2024 paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, a sample of community notes on misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccines “were accurate, cited moderate and high-credibility sources, and were attached to posts viewed hundreds of millions of times” — but the authors did not study the notes' impact on users.

Meanwhile, a survey of notes on US election day of November 5 by Cornell University digital harm researcher Alexios Mantzarlis found that only 29 per cent of “fact-checkable” posts had notes which were rated as helpful. Writing for the Poynter Institute he noted, “If Community Notes had an impact on election information quality on X, it was marginal at best.”

What Do Experts Say?

• Katja Munoz of the Berlin-based think-tank DGAP told AFP that community notes have been “very, very effective tool in content moderation”. She however noted that Wikimedia and Wikipedia are the better example to emulate, as they apply the feature in an equitable manner. Munoz also noted that Meta's move will set it on a path of collision with EU regulators.
• Christine Balaguer, a professor at France's Institut Mines-Telecom cautioned that while “the crowd may say something correct, there can also be ill-intentioned people who are there to spread disinformation”.
• Bill Adair, a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University and co-founder of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) noted that “fact-checkers weren't censors”. Adding that those working with Meta “were signatories of a code of principles that requires they be transparent and nonpartisan”.
• IFCN chief Angie Drobnic Holan also defended fact-checkers' work, writing on X that Zuckerberg had faced “extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters”.

(With inputs from AFP)