What Are Community Notes? and How Will It Shape Social Media on Facebook and Instagram?

This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg caused an uproar online when he announced that the tech giant would no longer do independent fact-checking. The program, introduced in 2016, will be replaced by Meta’s own version of Community Note. Community Note is a crowd-sourcing approach to reviewing online content used on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

So what exactly is Community Note and how does it work?

How Community Note works

Meta has not released details about how it will give users of Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms the ability to monitor content, said Melissa Mahtani, executive producer of CBS News Confirmed.

On X, Community Note works by leaving fact-checking up to the community. Approved contributors point out content they believe to be inaccurate or misleading by attaching a note that provides more context. Below is an example of a community note provided by X on his website:

“doesn`t take much” to become an approved contributor on X, Mahtani said. Any X user with a valid phone number and who has been registered on the platform for at least six months without any violations is eligible to volunteer as a contributor, she said. Contributors are protected by anonymity.

If an approved contributor believes a post is inaccurate or misleading, they will leave a note providing the user with additional context. The note will appear below the original post.

When a note is added by an approved contributor, it’s not yet visible to the general users of X. Before that happens, other approved contributors must vote on whether the note is helpful. This is where it gets “tough,” Mahtani says.

Was this note helpful?

When a note is added to a post in X, other approved contributors rate the note’s usefulness.

Mahtani explained: “Other contributors need to take a look at the sourcing, the accuracy of that note, and vote on whether or not it`s helpful. If they vote that it’s helpful — this is the tricky part — the company says that an algorithm takes a look at the ideological spectrum of all those contributors who voted. If they deem that those voters are diverse, it gets published.”

The algorithm decides

According to X’s website, the goal of the so-called bridge-based algorithm is to “identify notes that are helpful to a broad audience across perspectives.”

In other words, if the algorithm finds that contributors who voted on a given note represent an ideologically diverse group, then the note becomes visible on the platform. But if the algorithm finds that the voting contributors are too uniform in their political views — a possible sign of bias — “the public never sees it,” Mahtani said.

The problem with X’s crowd-based fact-checking system arises when valid notes pointing out misinformation are deemed useless by a diverse enough group of participants to satisfy the algorithm and are never seen by readers. The speed with which notices are published is also important to prevent the unhindered spread of false or misleading information.

An October report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed the Community Notes feature and found that 209 of 283 posts (74%) classified as misleading did not display accurate notes correcting false and misleading claims about the U.S. election.

For more information about how X’s Community Notes works, see X’s Community Notes page.