Meta’s Oversight Board warned against a broader roll-out of the approach its community notes takes to crowd-sourced fact-checking, especially in regions that have poor human rights records, due to concerns that the system could come with significant risks.
The Oversight Board issued its warning in response to a request from Meta to assess potential flaws in the community notes system, which the company implemented in the U.S. in January 2025.
Community notes reduces the power the company has to make calls on what content should be allowed in its apps and puts more onus on the users themselves. The process was first implemented by X in 2024, and has been lauded by X owner Elon Musk as a key step toward giving users more say in what’s acceptable, or not, in social apps.
Following the 2024 U.S. election, Meta announced that it would also be switching to community notes and ending its third-party fact-checking program. Thus far, Meta has only implemented the community notes approach in the U.S., and the Oversight Board advised caution when considering an expansion of the program.
As per the board: “The Oversight Board finds that community notes could enhance users’ freedom of expression and improve online discourse on Meta’s platforms if implemented with sufficient scale, speed and safeguards against manipulations. However, in certain circumstances — including in repressive human rights regimes, in particular electoral contexts and in ongoing crisis and conflict situations — expanding community notes to countries outside the United States could also pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy.”
The board’s view is that community notes could put contributors at risk in certain situations. In addition, the program could allow misinformation to spread in regions where citizens felt that they couldn’t speak up.
The board said delays in note publication, limitations on how many notes can be published and dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability may also restrict the capacity of user-generated annotations to replace third-party fact-checking.
As a result, the Oversight Board said countries with repressive human rights records should be omitted from the initial rollout of community notes “until Meta can demonstrate robust contributor privacy protections.” The board has also advised that Meta should not introduce community notes in advance of or during major elections where significant risks to the integrity of political institutions are present.
source mst
