Meta adds new features to Community Notes: All you need to know

Meta has officially announced new features for its crowdsourced fact-checking programme, Community Notes, launched in the US earlier this year.

The American tech giant revealed that now users will be notified when they’ve interacted with a post on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads that receives a Community Note.

Anyone can now request a note or rate a note if it’s been helpful to them. The company noted these features are considered “tests” at present. Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Meta CISO Guy Rosen shared that since the system’s launch, over 70,000 contributors have written 15,000 notes, only 6% of which were published.

For a market like the US with hundreds of millions of users across platforms, that’s still a small drop in the bucket.

Like X’s programme, Community Notes are added to a post when different users who typically share opposing viewpoints reach consensus, even if that spans their current ideological lines, political or otherwise.

To note, Community Notes can help to highlight misinformation and misleading posts, like those lacking further context. Critics point out that it can sometimes be hard to achieve that necessary consensus.

The nonprofit Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which advocates for digital rights, has pointed out that misinformation can spread virally before it’s corrected. The organisation questioned whether this type of system would work well in highly visual environments like Instagram and Reels or how well it could penetrate private silos on Facebook, like Groups.