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Expanding Meta’s Community Notes to countries outside the US could “pose significant human rights risks,” according to the tech giant’s quasi-independent Oversight Board. The board expressed concerns about how Community Notes could be leveraged by “coordinated disinformation networks” that could abuse them. In addition, the board found Community Notes could, in some contexts, “privilege dominant political, ethnic, or linguistic groups” and marginalize minorities.
Meta began to pivot away from using salaried teams of fact-checkers to the crowd-sourced Community Notes model just over a year ago, in March 2025. At the time, some of Meta’s top execs cited bias among fact-checkers as a major reason, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the move was part of wider plans to “restore free expression” on Meta's platforms.
“The likelihood and severity of these potential human rights risks and their adequate mitigation depend greatly on the design and functionality of the Community Notes product in each context,” read the advisory, first spotted by Nieman Lab.
The board also suggests that Meta will need to verify the effectiveness of its mitigation measures to ensure the anonymity of those who contribute and “protect against those who try to game the system.” The advisory highlighted other barriers to rolling out Community Notes outside the US, including translation issues or how many countries will still lack full internet connectivity in rural or deprived areas, which could lead to biased notes.
Many third-party organizations feel that Meta’s platforms, such as Facebook, have played a hand in stoking violent civil unrest outside the US. A 2022 report from Amnesty International laid the blame on Facebook's algorithms for contributing to ethnic cleansing aimed at Muslim minorities in Myanmar via "supercharging" inflammatory posts in 2017. Other nonprofits like Global Witness linked Facebook's past moderation failures to outbreaks of ethnic violence in Ethiopia in 2020.
Other organizations have weighed in with their takes about the worldwide expansion of Community Notes. Journalism nonprofit the Poynter Institute highlights that professional fact-checkers enabled Meta to label roughly 35 million Facebook posts in the EU, citing the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. Meanwhile, Meta reported that just 900 community notes became visible in the first six months of its US rollout.