By: Nick Gambino
Meta has decided to do away with fact checking in a controversial move announced last week. In place of checking facts they are opting to use community notes. This feature has proven successful in providing context and, funnily enough, fact checking over on X.
It’s no surprise that this back and forth and controversy is all tied up in politics. They originally started fact checking in 2016, the same year Trump was elected president. It seems the idea to use a third party to fact-check and keep things fair backfired.
“Experts, like everyone else, have their biases and perspectives,” Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, said in a Meta blog post. “This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.”
This change to do things the way X does them was just announced last week. It’s intended to be launched across Facebook, Instagram and Threads in the coming months in the U.S. Now it looks like Meta is already testing this community notes feature on Threads.
Developer Alessandro Paluzzi leaked screenshots of the test on Threads. The option to write a community note will show up in a dropdown menu alongside mute, follow and notify me buttons. According to these screenshots, when you do add a community note, it’s anonymous.
Your community note won’t automatically publish to the platform either. It will have to go through a user rating system and if rated high, indicating it’s a helpful community note, then it will be published with a little unintrusive label on the post.
This is a smart way of going about it. If there was zero filter and any user could just add a note to a post it would be utter chaos. It’s important to foster a quality community notes experience if you want it to be in any way helpful.
For now, this remains a small test, but I’m sure we’ll see it roll out and fully replace fact checking in the next month.
