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

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that the group’s platforms including Facebook and Instagram would in future imitate rival X’s "Community Notes” feature rather than using professional fact-checkers.The feature "empower(s) their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading” thanks to "people across a diverse range of perspectives,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post.Facebook’s fact-checking programme currently operates in 26 languages, partnering with more than 80 media organisations worldwide including AFP.When an X post has had a note appended, it is displayed to users with a small box titled "Readers added context”.Usually short and factual, expanding on or contradicting the original post, most published notes also include a link to relevant source material. Introduced in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch, Community Notes were boosted by Elon Musk after he took over Twitter in late 2022 and renamed it X, and they now appear to users in 44 countries. The social network "needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world”, Musk posted at the time. Any willing X user can sign up to Community Notes.Before writing notes of their own, they must first spend time rating other people’s suggested notes, contributing to the process that decides whether they are published. Even once allowed to write notes, users can lose the right if others consistently rate them unhelpful. X underscores that voting on notes is not by simple majority.Instead, the company looks for agreement between raters who have disagreed in the past — a system it says "helps reduce one-sided ratings and helps to prevent manipulation”.This has not stopped charges from politicians that highly motivated groups carpet-bomb posts they dislike with notes, hoping at least one will get through.There is little conclusive scientific analysis available of Community Notes’ effectiveness. One April 2024 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that a sample of notes on misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines "were accurate, cited moderate and high-credibility sources, and were attached to posts viewed hundreds of millions of times”.But the authors did not study the notes’ impact on users.Meanwhile in a survey of notes posted on November 5 — US election day — Cornell University digital harm researcher Alexios Mantzarlis found that just 29 percent of "fact-checkable” tweets for which notes were suggested in fact displayed a note rated as helpful."If Community Notes had an impact on election information quality on X, it was marginal at best,” Mantzarlis wrote in an article for the Poynter Institute. Some experts AFP spoke to were confident that Community Notes could improve information quality on Meta platforms."Community notes as such is a very, very effective tool in content moderation if applied in an equitable way, we can see that on Wikimedia or Wikipedia,” said Katja Munoz of the Berlin-based think-tank DGAP.Nevertheless, "the crowd may say something correct, but there can also be ill-intentioned people who are there to spread disinformation,” said Christine Balaguer, a professor at France’s Institut Mines-Telecom who studies the phenomenon. Eliminating fact-checking could set Meta up for a clash with the European Union if it expands the model outside the United States. The bloc’s Digital Services Act encourages platforms to fight misinformation with tools including professional fact-checkers. Zuckerberg’s move "is a major shock” that "announces the clashes that the tech platforms are going to be having with EU regulation in general”, Munoz said.In his statement, Zuckerberg said fact-checking had been "a program intended to inform (that) too often became a tool to censor”."Fact-checkers weren’t censors,” said Bill Adair, a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University and co-founder of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).Those working with Meta "were signatories of a code of principles that requires they be transparent and nonpartisan”, he noted.IFCN chief Angie Drobnic Holan also defended fact-checkers’ work, writing on X that Zuckerberg had faced "extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters”.Trump said Tuesday that Meta’s move had "probably” been in response to his threats against the company and Zuckerberg.