Meta’s community notes are slated to debut in the upcoming months, following the social network’s decision to discontinue its own fact-checking initiative, as factual accuracy seems so 2015. You can now register as a contributor by signing up through Facebook, Instagram, or Threads.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the owner of X, seems to be challenging the neutrality of his platform’s community notes, revealing intentions to “fix” the feature …
In earlier times, when people valued the truth in claims, social networks employed professional researchers to validate assertions made on their platforms, aimed at curbing misinformation.
After Musk acquired X, he replaced those professionals with Community Notes, allowing other X users to provide corrections and context to tweets. Recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that their social networks would follow suit.
We will discontinue the existing third-party fact-checking program in the US and transition to a Community Notes model. This approach has proven effective on X – empowering the community to determine when posts might be misleading and need additional context, with contributions from a diverse range of perspectives to offer the most helpful information to users. We believe this could be a more effective means of achieving our initial goal of providing accurate information about the content users encounter – and one that carries less risk of bias.
You can apply to participate in the program here.
Musk seems displeased with the numerous community notes addressing his own tweets and those of users he has retweeted. Particularly, he took issue with corrections regarding Trump’s assertion about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s approval ratings.
Musk falsely claimed that Zelensky manipulated poll results and inaccurately suggested that the president was refusing to hold elections during the war — ignoring Ukraine’s law, which states that holding fair elections under wartime conditions is unfeasible.
Even Musk’s own Grok AI provides corrections to him:
The assertion that Zelensky “withholds elections” as a dictatorial act is incorrect. The delay of elections, originally set for March 2024, is mandated by Ukraine’s constitution and the “Martial Law Act” (No. 389-VIII), which bans elections during a state of emergency—currently in effect due to Russia’s ongoing invasion since February 2022. The decision is not solely Zelensky’s but must be approved by parliament, which renews this status every 90 days.
Nevertheless, Musk claims he will “fix” the fact-checking process.
Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being manipulated by governments & legacy media.
Taking steps to correct this …
This comment follows Musk’s earlier statement where he referred to community notes as “awesome.”
Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash
