As some of you may already know, Meta’s social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — are following the tack of X, formerly Twitter, in adopting a Community Notes model for itself when it comes to people making statements on the internet.

Meta itself started testing the Community Notes model for its services on Tuesday, March 18, with around 200,000 potential contributors in the US signing up for the system. This came after it ended its fact-checking program in the United States.

Now, that’s all well and good, but does the Community Notes model actually help as much when compared to a dedicated fact-checking initiative? I would reckon it doesn’t quite do the job of addressing falsehoods and providing context to misleading statements well enough.

Let’s dive in.

How does the Community Notes model work?

The Community Notes model has users of a given service providing context to contentious posts needing clarifications. X and Meta both note that the community’s notes aren’t decided on by the companies themselves but by a consensus of people from across the political spectrum.

As Meta says in its post for its testing phase, “No matter how many contributors agree on a note, it won’t be published unless people who normally disagree decide that it provides helpful context.”

This is well-meaning, but context is quite difficult to assign on X or Meta’s services if there’s a character limit to your explanations. Meta’s Community Notes model, for example, has a 500-character limit and requires a link to data or information supporting the contextualization of a post so it can be put up for consideration and used.

Further, in the Community Notes model, the reach of a given post is not affected even if there’s a contextual note appended to it. As Meta explained in its FAQ on its testing phase, “Notes will provide extra context, but they won’t impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared.”

What’s so bad about having community notes?

So, as you might have inferred, X and Meta are passing the buck of policing social media for falsehoods onto its user base, requiring them to be succinct, and for a note to be accepted by the spectrum of political thought before it can be appended to a post.

Must Read

Philippines faces rising AI-driven disinformation

While there’s technically nothing wrong about setting up a Community Notes model for your platform, it also doesn’t address the deficiencies of a world inundated with bullshit and competing ideologies.

Poynter Institute’s MediaWise Director Alex Mahadevan, in a 2023 discussion with fact-checkers, pointed out one shortcoming of the model, in that Community Notes can be gamed or brigaded against having a note put on something if there’s no “ideological consensus” towards what is true.

At that time, X users had written some 122,000 notes over the course of the program, but the average X user could only see around 10,400, or about 8.5% of them.

Worse still, a community note of 500 characters lends itself to a somewhat limited tackling of a contentious post. At best, it can add nuance, but you can expect most accepted community notes to just be more or less binary.

A note comprising “This is true!” or “This is false!” or “This is made with AI” statements and an appended link also do little to dissuade someone from sharing something that feels right to them.

Fact-checkers just do it better!

I personally scoff at the idea of X and Meta saying Community Notes would be “less biased than the third-party fact checking program it replaces, and to operate at a greater scale when it is fully up and running.”

People who fact-check for a living, and who do it professionally with a code of ethics pointed towards the truth and not ideological equilibrium will also happen to do the job of policing falsehoods better.

True enough, Maldita.es, in an analysis of the impact of X’s community notes, made it clear that fact-checking organizations are a commonly used reference for community notes made around the world on X.

According to their analysis of the the 1,175,837 community notes proposed by X users worldwide in 2024, fact-checking organizations are the third-most used reference behind other X posts and Wikipedia, with links to fact-checkers making up 1 in every 27 notes proposed. Community notes that link to fact-checked information are also more trusted by X users and thus more likely to become visible alongside tweets with disinformation.

Contrary to what X and Meta would have you believe, a fact-checked citation is is also generally faster to be adopted as part of a community note than just your standard non-fact-checked citation. Said Maldita.es, “They become visible 90 minutes earlier than general notes.”

Biased against lies

For lies to stop spreading, they must be called out for what they are, nipped at the bud, and removed from circulation so as to not let it grow into something worse.

The Community Notes model fails to kill off lies for a false sense of ideological equilibrium and will allow them to spread regardless.

If Meta and X were truly concerned with anything other than getting engagement bucks, it would be biased towards nothing less than the truth, even if the truth is scary, or off-putting, or painful to accept.

Must Read

[Tech Thoughts] Fact checkers wade through the muck so you don’t drown in it

Instead, social media platforms with Community Notes models will let a lie remain on the internet like a puddle of ever-growing quicksand, with a note attached to a pole saying, “You may not what to step on that puddle,” waiting for people to drown in the muck.

Meta and X should hire fact-checkers to do the job of fighting off falsehoods and then these platforms should focus on deplatforming liars, even if their CEOs themselves are caught being bullshit artists.

Anything less is a disservice. – Rappler.com