Meta has a habit of copying its competitors’ features. But not to assume it so openly. “We are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with “community notes” [“notes de la communauté”]similar to those of [réseau social concurrent] X, starting with the United States »said Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg in a video published Tuesday, January 7. An announcement which raises questions, both on the precise contours of this tool and on the future of moderation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
How and when will these “community notes” be deployed on Meta applications (Facebook, Instagram, Threads)?
Mark Zuckerberg’s sudden announcement was not accompanied by concrete details, other than that the tool would be deployed “during the year”. The dedicated help page on Facebook is content with a terse “soon” for its activation date in the United States. Which reasonably suggests that the deployment of such a tool is still being developed.
Meta’s agenda for Europe is even more vague: for the moment, there is no official question for the company of questioning its partnership with fact-checking media.
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How do community notes work?
On community notes were generalized in February 2023. They were then presented by Elon Musk as the ultimate solution to disinformation, involving users of the platform. Thus, 880,000 of them, on a voluntary basis, can offer “notes” under any tweet (including an advertisement) to highlight an error, a lie or its misleading nature.
A note, deemed useful by a sufficient number of volunteers “who have disagreed in the past” but are understood in this case, will be validated and will appear quite visibly under the incriminated tweet. However, the precise criteria which determine whether a note is published or not have not been revealed by X.
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