Tech giant says it expects new feature to be ‘less biased’ than previous third-party fact-checking program.
Meta has announced that its “Community Notes” feature, designed to replace third-party fact-checkers, will utilize the open-source algorithm developed by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the moderation overhaul in January, amid a series of efforts by Big Tech companies to align themselves with the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
The decision came after years of criticism from conservatives, who argued that fact-checking initiatives often mislabeled legitimate viewpoints as misinformation for political or ideological reasons.
While Trump and many conservatives praised Meta’s announcement, misinformation experts warned that the move could exacerbate the spread of false claims and fake news online.
In a blog post on Thursday, Meta stated that adopting X’s technology for its crowdsourced fact-checking tool would enable the company to “improve it for our own platforms over time.”
“As our own version evolves, we may explore different or adjusted algorithms to enhance how Community Notes are ranked and rated,” Meta said.
“We’re building this in the open while learning from contributors and observing how it functions in practice within our products. We don’t expect this process to be perfect, but we’ll continue to refine it as we learn.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, announced that it will begin testing the feature on March 18 and that 200,000 potential contributors have already signed up to help evaluate the accuracy of content on its platforms.
The California-based tech giant emphasized that notes will only be published if they are deemed accurate by contributors representing a diverse range of viewpoints.
“We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third-party fact-checking program it replaces and to operate at a larger scale once fully implemented,” Meta said.
“When we launched the fact-checking program in 2016, we were clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth and believed that relying on expert fact-checking organizations was the best solution available at the time.”
Meta stated that the new feature will be rolled out across the U.S. after beta testing and plans to eventually make it available to all users worldwide.
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