Meta will soon begin testing its new Community Notes moderation feature across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in the United States. The company wrote that it expects the moderation tool to be less biased than the third part fact checking program it replaces because it allows more people with more perspectives to add context to posts.
So far around 200,000 potential contributors have signed up in the US, and the waitlist remains open for those who wish to take part in the program. Initially notes won't appear on the content and will only be used for internal purposes, as the company plans on gradually testing the system before notes are published publicly.
It's weird that Meta directly mentions its competitor X's notes tool as inspiration for its new program. Meta wrote:
“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.”
Meta even said that it will be using X's open source algorithm as the basis for its rating system.
Here's what else we know about Community Notes:
- 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 so that there's no bias towards the information.
- Once a Notes contributor has submitted a new note, it will be rated by other approved contributors before going live.
- Eventually Meta plans to make the feature available in six languages commonly used in the US including English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Portuguese, expanding to other languages in time if the experiment goes well.
- Notes won’t have penalties (such as reduced distribution) associated with them the way fact checks did. They will provide extra context, but not impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared.
- Once Notes begin to appear publicly, no new fact check labels from third party fact checkers will appear in the United States, however Meta says that fact checkers are free to become Notes contributors (which is an unpaid position).
Meta says its goal is to ultimately roll out this new approach worldwide, but it will begin with the United States once it feels comfortable from the initial beta testing.