We’re Back to the Actually Internet
One Friday in April, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, announced that the process of removing fact-checking from Facebook, Threads, and Instagram was nearly complete. By the following Monday, there would be “no new fact checks and no fact checkers” working across these platforms, which are used by billions of people globally—no professionals marking disinformation about vaccines or stolen elections. Elon Musk, owner of X—a rival platform with an infamously permissive approach to content moderation—replied to Kaplan, writing, “Cool.”
Meta, then just called Facebook, began its fact-checking program in December 2016, after President Donald Trump was first elected and the social network was criticized for allowing the rampant spread of fake news. The company will still take action against many kinds of problematic content—threats of violence, for example. But it has left the job of patrolling many kinds of misinformation to users themselves. Now, if users are so compelled, they can turn to a Community Notes program, which allows regular people to officially contradict one another’s posts with clarifying or corrective supplementary text. A Facebook post stating that the sun has changed color might receive a useful correction, but only if someone decided to write one and submit it for consideration. Almost anyone can sign up for the program (Meta says users must be over 18 and have accounts “in good standing”), making it, in theory, an egalitarian approach to content moderation.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called the pivot on misinformation a return to the company’s “roots,” with Facebook and Instagram as sites of “free expression.” He announced the decision to adopt Community Notes back in January, and explicitly framed the move as a response to the 2024 elections, which he described as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” Less explicitly, Meta’s shift to Community Notes is a response to years of being criticized from both sides of the aisle over the company’s approach to misinformation. Near the end of his last term, Trump targeted Facebook and other online platforms with an executive order accusing them of “selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” and during the Biden administration, Zuckerberg said he was pressured to take down more posts about COVID than he wanted to.
Meta’s abandonment of traditional fact-checking may be cynical, but misinformation is also an intractable problem. Fact-checking assumes that if you can get a trustworthy source to provide better information, you can save people from believing false claims. But people have different ideas of what makes a trustworthy source, and there are times when people want to believe wrong things. How can you stop them? And, the second question that platforms are now asking themselves: How hard should you try?
Community Notes programs—originally invented in 2021 by a team at X, back when it was still called Twitter—are a somewhat perplexing attempt at solving the problem. It seems to rely on a quaint, naive idea of how people behave online: Let’s just talk it out! Reasonable debate will prevail! But, to the credit of social-media platforms, the approach is not as starry-eyed as it seems.
The chief innovation of Community Notes is that the annotations are generated by consensus among people who might otherwise see things differently. Not every note that is written actually appears under a given post; instead, they are assessed using “bridging” algorithms, which are meant to “bridge” divides by accounting for what’s called “diverse positive feedback.” This means that a potential note is valued more highly and is more likely to appear on a post if it is rated “helpful” by a wide array of people who have demonstrated different biases at other times. The basics of this system have quickly become a new industry standard. Shortly after Meta’s announcement about the end of fact-checking, TikTok said that it would be testing its own version of Community Notes, called Footnotes—though unlike Meta and X, TikTok will keep using a formal fact-checking program as well.
These tools are “a good idea and do more good than harm,” Paul Friedl, a researcher at Humboldt University, in Berlin, told me. Friedl co-authored a 2024 paper on decentralized content moderation for Internet Policy Review, which discussed X’s Community Notes among other examples, including Reddit’s forums and old Usenet messaging threads. A major benefit he and his co-author cited was that these programs may help create a “culture of responsibility” by encouraging communities “to reflect, debate, and agree” on the purpose of whatever online space they’re using.
Platforms certainly have good reasons to embrace the model. The first, according to Friedl, is the cost. Rather than employing fact-checkers around the world, these programs require only a simple algorithm. Users do the work for free. The second is that people like them—they often find the context added to posts by fellow users to be helpful and interesting. The third is politics. For the past decade, platforms—and Meta in particular—have been highly reactive to political events, moving from crisis to crisis and angering critics in the process. When Facebook first started flagging fake news, it was perceived as too little, too late by Democrats and reckless censorship by Republicans. It significantly expanded its fact-checking program in 2020 to deal with rampant misinformation (often spread by Trump) about the coronavirus pandemic and that year’s election. From March 1, 2020, to Election Day that year, according to Facebook’s self-reporting, the company displayed fact-checking labels on more than 180 million pieces of content. Again, this was perceived as both too much and not enough. With a notes-based system, platforms can sidestep the hassle of public scrutiny over what is or isn’t fact-checked and why and cleanly remove themselves from drama. They avoid making contentious decisions, Friedl said, which helps in an effort “not to lose cultural capital with any user bases.”
John Stoll, the recently hired head of news at X, told me something similar about Community Notes. The tool is the “best solution” to misinformation, he said, because it takes “a sledgehammer to a black box.” X’s program allows users to download all notes and their voting history in enormous spreadsheets. By making moderation visible and collaborative, instead of secretive and unaccountable, he argued, X has discovered how to do things in “the most equitable, fair, and most pro-free-speech way.” (“Free speech” on X, it should be noted, has also meant platforming white supremacists and other hateful users who were previously banned under Twitter’s old rules.)
[Read: X is a white-supremacist site]
People across the political spectrum do seem to trust notes more than they do standard misinformation flags. That may be because notes feel more organic and tend to be more detailed. In the 2024 paper, Friedl and his co-author wrote that Community Notes give responsibilities “to those most intimately aware of the intricacies of specific online communities.” Those people may also be able to work faster than traditional fact-checkers—X claims that notes usually appear in a matter of hours, while a complicated independent fact-check can take days.
Yet all of these advantages have their limits. Community Notes is really best suited to nitpicking individual instances of people lying or just being wrong. It cannot counter sophisticated, large-scale disinformation campaigns or penalize repeated bad actors (as the old fact-checking regime did). When Twitter’s early version of Community Notes, then called Birdwatch, debuted, the details of the mechanism were made public in a paper that acknowledged another important limitation: The algorithm “needs some cross-partisan agreement to function,” which may, at times, be impossible to find. If there is no consensus, there are no notes.
Musk himself has provided a good case study for this issue. A few Community Notes have vanished from Musk’s posts. It’s possible that he had them removed—at times, he has seemed to resent the power that X has given its users through the program, suggesting that the system is “being gamed” and chiding users for citing “legacy media”—but the disappearances could instead be an algorithmic issue. An influx of either Elon haters or Elon fans could ruin the consensus and the notes’ helpfulness ratings, leading them to disappear. (When I asked about this problem, Stoll told me, “We’re, as a company, 100 percent committed to and in love with Community Notes,” but he did not comment on what had happened to the notes removed from Musk’s posts.)
The early Birdwatch paper also noted that the system might get really, really good at moderating “trivial topics.” That is the tool’s core weakness and its core strength. Notes, because they are written and voted on by people with numerous niche interests and fixations, can appear on anything. While you’ll see them on something classically wrong and dangerous, such as conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, you’ll also see them on things that are ridiculous and harmless, such as a cute video of a hedgehog. (The caption for a hedgehog video I saw last week suggested that a stumbling hedgehog was being “helped” across a street by a crow; the Community Note clarified that the crow was probably trying to kill it, and the original poster deleted the post.) At times, the disputes can be wildly annoying or pedantic and underscore just how severe a waste of your one life it is to be online at all. I laughed recently at an X post: “People really log on here to get upset at posts and spend their time writing entire community notes that amount to ‘katy perry isn’t an astronaut.’”
[Read: The perfect pop star for a dumb stunt]
The upside, though, is that when anything can be annotated, it feels like less of a big deal or a grand conspiracy when something is. Formal fact-checking programs can feel punitive and draconian, and they give people something to rally against; notes come from peers. This makes receiving one potentially more embarrassing than receiving a traditional fact-check as well; early research has shown that people are likely to delete their misleading posts when they receive Community Notes.
The optimistic take on notes-type systems is that they make use of material that already exists and with which everyone is already acquainted. People already correct each other online all the time: On nearly any TikTok in which someone is saying something obviously wrong, the top comment will be from another person pointing this out. It becomes the top comment because other users “like” it, which bumps it up. I already instinctively look to the comment section whenever I hear something on TikTok and think, That can’t be true, right?
For better or worse, the idea of letting the crowd decide what needs correcting is a throwback to the era of internet forums, where actually culture got its start. But this era of content moderation will not last forever, just as the previous one didn’t. By outright saying that a cultural and political vibe, of sorts, inspired the change, Meta has already suggested as much. We live on the actually internet for now. Whenever the climate shifts—or whenever the heads of the platforms perceive it to shift—we’ll find ourselves someplace else.