I got up bright and early to join Fox and Friends this week to talk about the end of Meta’s Fact Checking regime and their launch of Community Notes.
The shear volume of information that bombards us online can feel overwhelming. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake, so social media platforms try to provide tools to help us sort through the noise. Facebook leveraged “Third Party” Fact Checkers, supposed experts who could unilaterally decide if content was accurate, or if it was so-called “misinformation”. These Fact Checkers were not exactly free of bias and wielded strong authority to control public narrative over important issues.
As you likely know, I was an outspoken critic of this system, especially so in 2020, and I am happy to see this program come to an end in the United States. The Public was also not particularly pleased with having a strong central authority as an arbiter of truth.
Years of Covid controversies, lying politicians and rising censorship have taught us that centralized gate keepers inevitably silence critical debate and drive a biased agenda. Dissenting opinions, many of which are now validated, where silenced or throttled and honest people were banned. Nobody is perfect, and the gate keepers were not either. This resulted in too many false positives and a policy of censorship first where innocent people had their rights to free speech violated. Fact Checking was a huge contributor to the decline of our civil discourse and plunging faith in our institutions.
Meta has read the room and listened up. The biggest platform in the world has discontinued their fact checking program in the United States and moved instead to something I hope can be far better.
Community Notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking system designed to provide additional context to false or misleading posts across Facebook and Instagram. It follows a similar approach to X’s system of the same name Community Notes (formerly Bird Watch). It aims to combat misinformation by allowing users to contribute and evaluate context collaboratively. Notes are only added once people who traditionally disagree with one another agree on the need.
Contributors across each platform can add notes to posts they believe require additional context. These notes might correct false information, provide missing details, or clarify misleading claims. Other contributors rate these notes as helpful or not helpful.
Meta then employs an algorithmic ranking system using advanced machine learning to feature the notes that best represent the consensus of the community. Instead of just using majority rule, the system prioritizes notes that receive approval from people with diverse perspectives, reducing political or ideological bias.
Unlike traditional fact-checking, which relies on supposed experts or journalists, Community Notes are scalable and independent, using decentralized user input. The system is designed to minimize the influence of coordinated manipulation or echo chambers. And, most importantly, they make it much harder for a single special interest to drive an agenda or silence critics.
This breakthrough is huge, and indicates a tremendous shift from centralized authoritarianism. Just 4 years ago, in 2021, the company I founded was deplatformed by virtually every major platform for rejecting centralized content control and built a Community Jury system. Similar to what Meta is rolling out here, the Jury system was a great tool for moderating gray area items that are not clear cut violations of the community guidelines. It’s a complete reversal, on social status quo, and it’s significant.
Are there still challenges? Absolutely. In building the Community Jury System, we learned a ton, and Meta will no doubt face similar challenges, both in technology, human action and execution. But the trend has turned around 180 degrees and I remain optimistic and excited as I watch for what will come next.
