X's 'Community Notes': A model for Meta?

PARIS, France — Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said 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