In January Meta announced an end to its third party content moderation policy. It will be replaced with X inspired community notes and the company is set to launch a beta version this week. It will be tested by pre-registered users before a public release.
Community notes is a user driven fact-check model to hold the community accountable and stop the spread of misinformation by lending abstract, unsupported ideas a reliable context. Originally known as birdwatch, it was used by Twitter to prevent misleading posts, before its acquisition in 2022 by Elon Musk, who renamed it community notes.
How does it keep misinformation in check?
Community notes use public sentiment and collective guidance to keep misleading posts at bay and lend credibility to the truth through relevant context and reliable sources. A user can flag deceiving or ambiguous information on a post and add notes to it, however, it gets published publicly only if it is supported by other contributors.
In January, Meta announced that it will use X’s open source algorithm and program information and improve it for its own platforms. It is now ready to launch a beta version for its users in the US where contributors will be able to write and rate notes across the three Meta platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Threads.
These notes will not immediately appear publicly and so far 200,000 potential contributors in the US have signed up to be a part of the testing across the three apps. The waitlist is still open for interested users and Meta will use it to analyse “the writing and rating system before any notes are published publicly,” according to Meta’s official website.
It will be limited to 500 characters per note and will be published publicly after consensus from other contributors with diverse opinions.
Meta argues that this feature will increase transparency on the platform and give respite to users who were initially sent to Facebook or Instagram jail due to content moderation policies. Users often complain of bias and lack of verification when their accounts are put in “jail” which results in restricted reach and inability to comment for a limited time. Often reconsideration requests are also automatically rejected and cause users with large following and branded content distress.
Critics are concerned that this might lead to widespread misinformation across the platforms.
Meta will launch the model for public consumption in the US after initial testing and it will be sometime before it launches internationally. Until then, Meta will continue to use third-party fact-check models in the other countries.
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