Meta Updates Community Notes, Shares Stats on Usage

Meta has announced some new updates to its variation of Community Notes, which it’s gradually expanding as it learns more about how people are using notes, and how it can improve the notes system.

First off, Meta will now enable users to indicate whether they found a note beneficial or not, via a simple upvote/downvote mechanism.

As you can see in this example, now, all users will be able to indicate the relative value of each Community Note they come across, by simply tapping the thumbs up or down icons. That will then give Meta more feedback about the relevance of each note, which it could use to both improve individual note presentation, and refine its approach to all notes displayed.

And like X, Meta will now also enable all users to request a Community Note on a post they come across, which will expand the feedback process.

Finally, Meta’s also rolling out new notifications of when a post that you’ve interacted with gets a Community Note.

That will help to address misinformation, by alerting users to any concerns with content that they’ve shared. Because once somebody’s shared something, it’s out of mind, yet the information included in that post will likely stick in their memory. But simple alerts like this can help to address false claims, and ensure users don’t end up spouting those same fake notes.

Meta’s also provided an update on how its Community Notes system is growing, after launching the process with U.S. users back in March.

• Meta says that it has admitted over 250,000 contributors for Community Notes, and about 70,000 of them are now responding to notes as contributors. Which may seem like a relatively small amount, given the scope of potential contributors, but a lot of these early applications would have just been out of interest, and likely had no intention of contributing.
• Meta says that around 15,000 notes have been written thus far. Worth noting here that Meta’s Community Notes system is only available in the U.S. at this stage.
• Though this is probably the most interesting stat: Of those 15k notes that have been submitted, only 6% have been published and displayed to users.

The last note is interesting because it reflects the same flaw with X’s system, in that the vast majority of Community Notes are never actually displayed.

Some see this as a feature, not a bug, in that the system is designed to filter out unnecessary, unhelpful and biased notes, which is why so few of the proposed notes ever make it through the review process. But on X, the issue here is that many of these notes don’t get displayed (85% of all Community Notes are never displayed to X users) due to political disagreement, and the qualifier that requires contributors of opposing political perspectives to agree that a note is needed before it gets shown.

That means that for many of the most divisive political issues, no Community Notes are displayed, because there will never be general consensus on these issues. That then enables political misinformation to proliferate unchecked, and without third-party fact-checkers supporting the process, these falsehoods are then allowed to spread throughout Facebook’s massive user base.

For example, in a study conducted last year, these were the issues identified as least likely to have a Community Note displayed, despite them being proposed:

Some fairly concerning falsehoods in there, but you can also see why political consensus will be almost impossible to attain for such claims.

That’s the key flaw with the Community Notes system, and while building in a process to counter political bias makes sense, how it actually works in the app remains a concern.

And Meta’s now reflecting the same issue, based on its created-to-shown ratio here.

It’s also worth noting that Meta hasn’t expanded Community Notes to other regions as yet, preferring to stick with its fact-checking processes in other nations. That could suggest that it’s only looking to implement Community Notes in the U.S., in an effort to align with the Trump Administration, and it’ll be interesting to see if Meta’s Community Notes ever expands to other nations.

Either way, some new features, and gradual growth for Meta’s crowd-sourced fact-checking approach. Which appears to be working, and not, as expected.