TORONTO — Experts are worried the community notes program Meta will replace its current fact checking system with has several pitfalls that could allow misinformation to spread even further.
They say the Facebook, Instagram and Threads owner should rethink the move Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday because the community notes model — a system that relies on users to append false posts — hasn’t managed to quell harmful content as well as human fact checkers.
“I find this very worrying,” said Kaitlynn Mendes, a sociology professor at Western University and the Canada Research Chair in inequality and gender, in an email.
“Reducing content moderators is going to increase the amount of harmful, hateful, violent, racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic content out there.”
In announcing the move to community notes, Zuckerberg said he was guiding his company “back to our roots around free expression” and away from fact checkers that “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the U.S.”
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far,” he said.
“I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
The community notes system he sees as a solution will make its Meta debut in the U.S.
Asked what Zuckerberg’s announcement means for Meta’s Canadian fact checking efforts and any staff devoted to the program in the country, spokesperson Julia Perreira said the company will continue to improve the community notes model launching in the U.S. over the course of the year before its expansion to other countries.
“Building a community will take time,” she said in an email. “There are no changes in other countries at this time.”
The community notes system Zuckerberg plans to use is being modelled after a similar program implemented by X, formerly known as Twitter.
The troubles many have with community notes lie in how the system depends on platform users spotting potential misinformation and appending it with a note describing why it’s wrong, said Brett Caraway, a professor of media economics at the University of Toronto.
“Numerous studies have shown that community notes has failed to identify viral misinformation and is uneven in its application,” he wrote in an email.
Once users append a post using community notes, others have the ability to vote on whether they agree with the note, said Richard Lachman, the associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Radio and Television Arts School of Media.