(Credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
UPDATE 4/5: Effective Monday, Meta's fact-checking program will be kaput, according to Joel Kaplan, Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer.
"By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over," Kaplan tweeted on Friday. "That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers."
In their place will be X-style Community Notes, which will "start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached," according to Kaplan. Previously, posts that were flagged by fact-checkers were downranked in feeds.
The switch is only happening in the US for now. Meta says it will improve Community Notes "over the course of the year before expansion to other countries."
Original Story 3/13:
Meta will begin testing Community Notes for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads on March 18.
The Community Notes model, first announced in January, is intended "to be less biased than the third-party fact-checking program it replaces," Meta says.
The company did not provide specific examples of biased fact-checking; the system launched in December 2016 after CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed the idea of social media impacting elections as a "crazy idea." As of last year, Meta had 10 fact-checking partners in the US, including FactCheck.org and USA Today. Flagged content was downranked in feeds.
Today, Meta said Community Notes will be "less prone to bias...because publishing a note requires agreement between different people."
Fact-checked posts, however, won't be downranked. "Notes will provide extra context, but they won’t impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared," Meta says. Fact-checking partners "are free to become" Community Notes contributors.
Meta started accepting contributor sign-ups last month; about 200,000 people have signed up. To become a contributor, one must be based in the US, be 18+, have an account older than six months "in good standing," and have a verified phone number or enroll in two-factor authentication.
Each note can be 500 characters, must include a link, and adhere to Meta's Community Standards. All notes are written by humans and are posted only if "enough contributors" agree they're helpful. At launch, Community Notes will be supported in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Portuguese. More languages will be added later on.
Meta won't display author names on the notes. They will just say, "People added a community note," and show when it was posted. "We want notes to be rated based on whether the context they add is helpful, not on who wrote them," Meta says. Once a note appears, users will be able to rate it by choosing whether it was "Not helpful" or "helpful."
(Credit: Meta)Notes also won't appear under ads. (There were rumors about Meta accepting payments to exempt ad posts from Community Notes.) However, contributors will be allowed to submit notes under posts by all other users, including Meta executives, politicians, and other public figures.
On Thursday, Meta reiterated that Community Notes is taking a page from X. "We won’t be reinventing the wheel," the company says in an unsigned blog post. "Initially, we will use X's open-source algorithm as the basis of our rating system. This will allow us to build on what X has created and improve it for our own platforms over time."
Meta will, however, make modifications and improve its system over time. "As our own version develops, we may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated," it says.
Meta is rolling this out in the US first; elsewhere, the fact-checking system will remain.
"Once comfortable with the beta testing, Meta will roll out the feature to all users in the US," it says. "Eventually, Meta hopes to expand the feature to all users across the globe."