Testing begins for Community Notes on Facebook, Instagram and Threads

In January, Meta announced that we will end our third party fact checking programme and move to a crowd-sourced Community Notes approach, starting in the United States.

On 18 March, we will begin testing this new approach by allowing contributors from our community to write and rate notes on content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

We’re going to take time to do this right. Around 200 000 potential contributors in the US have signed up so far across all three apps, and the waitlist remains open for those who wish to take part in the programme. But notes won’t initially appear on content.

We will start by gradually and randomly admitting people off of the waitlist, and will take time to test the writing and rating system before any notes are published publicly.

How do Community Notes work?

• Many of you will be familiar with X’s Community Notes system, in which users add context to posts. That’s the broad approach we are adopting
• Meta won’t decide what gets rated or written – contributors from our community will. And to safeguard against bias, Notes won’t be published unless contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them
• This isn’t majority rules. No matter how many contributors agree on a Note, it won’t be published unless people who normally disagree decide that it provides helpful context
• Community Notes will have a limit of 500 characters and will need to include a link to support the Note

• To start with, Notes won’t have author names attached to them. We want Notes to be rated based on whether the context they add is helpful, not on who wrote them
• Contributors need to be over 18, have an account that’s more than six months old and in good standing, and either have a verified phone number or be enrolled in two-factor authentication
• The Community Notes feature will be available in six languages commonly used in the US to start, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese, and we will expand to other languages with time
• To start with, contributors will not be able to submit Notes on advertisements. They can, however, write and submit Notes on almost any other forms of content, including posts by Meta, our executives, politicians and other public figures

We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third party fact checking programme it replaces, and to operate at a greater scale when it is fully up and running.

When we launched the fact checking programme in 2016, we were clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth and believed that turning to expert fact checking organisations was the best solution available. But that’s not how it played out, particularly in the US.

Experts, like everyone else, have their own political biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how.

Community Notes allow more people with more perspectives to add context to more types of content, and because publishing a note requires agreement between different people, we believe it will be less prone to bias. This requirement is also a safeguard against organised campaigns attempting to game the system and influence what Notes get published or what they say.

See ‘More Speech and Fewer Mistakes’, here

Notes also won’t have penalties associated with them the way fact checks did. Fact checked posts often had their distribution across our platforms reduced. That won’t be the case with posts that have Notes applied to them. Notes will provide extra context, but they won’t impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared.

Our plan is to roll out Community Notes across the US once we are comfortable from the initial beta testing that the programme is working in broadly the way we believe it should, though we will continue to learn and improve it as we go.

Once Notes begin to appear publicly, no new fact check labels from third party fact checkers will appear in the US, though fact checkers are free to become Community Notes contributors alongside other users of our platform.

Our intention is ultimately to roll out this new approach to our users all over the world, but we won’t be doing that immediately. Until Community Notes are launched in other countries, the third party fact checking programme will remain in place for them.

• This was originally published here