X’s ‘Community Notes’: a model for Meta?

New York: So, it looks like Meta is taking a page from X’s playbook. You know, the whole ‘Community Notes’ thing that X has been doing since 2021? Well, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram will start using a similar approach instead of relying on professional fact-checkers.

Zuckerberg believes this will let the community decide what’s misleading. He mentioned that it’s all about getting diverse perspectives. Right now, Facebook’s fact-checking program is pretty extensive, working in 26 languages and teaming up with over 80 media organizations worldwide.

So, what exactly are these Community Notes? When someone adds a note to a post on X, it shows up with a little box saying “Readers added context.” These notes are usually short and factual, either adding info or contradicting the original post, and they often link to credible sources.

This feature started as Birdwatch in January 2021 and got a boost from Elon Musk after he took over. Now, it’s available in 44 countries. Musk has been pretty vocal about wanting X to be the most accurate source of information out there.

Anyone on X can join in and write Community Notes, but first, they have to rate other notes. If they get enough thumbs down, they can lose that privilege. The voting system is designed to avoid one-sided ratings, which is interesting, but some folks think it can still be gamed.

As for how effective these notes are, there’s not a ton of solid research. A study found that some notes on Covid-19 vaccine misinformation were accurate and linked to credible sources, but they didn’t look at how users reacted to them.

On election day, a survey showed that only 29% of tweets that could be fact-checked actually had helpful notes. So, it seems like the impact might be pretty minimal.

Experts are hopeful that if Meta applies Community Notes fairly, it could really help improve information quality. But there’s a catch: there are always people out there who might want to spread false info.

If Meta rolls this out in Europe, it could run into trouble with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which encourages platforms to use professional fact-checkers. Zuckerberg’s shift could lead to some serious clashes with EU regulations.

He claims that fact-checking has often turned into censorship, but others argue that fact-checkers are supposed to be transparent and nonpartisan. There’s a lot of debate going on, especially with political pressures in play.

So, it’ll be interesting to see how this all unfolds and what it means for the future of social media.