Meta is beginning its international expansion of Community Notes. The company said it is starting to test the crowd-sourced fact checks in 16 countries in Latin America more than a year after it rolled out the program stateside and ended its partnership with US-based fact checking organizations.
The company says it plans to take a similar approach with its initial tests in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The platform is starting to onboard contributors to who, if approved, will be able to write notes that add “additional context” to posts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. During the testing phase, contributors’ notes will not be surfaced to users and “there will be no changes to third-party fact checking,” Meta says in a blog post originally published in Spanish.
But the company goes on to suggest that it intends for Community Notes to eventually replace existing fact-checking arrangements in these countries. “When we’re confident the product is working well and can be successful, we will look at fully launching – beginning to publish Community Notes and transitioning our third-party fact checking program,” Meta writes, according to a translation provided by the company.
Unsurprisingly, Meta’s move to potentially end fact checking in a large swath of Latin America has alarmed fact checking organizations. In a statement published by Poynter, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) said it was “deeply concerned” by the news. “The community notes program alone is simply not adequate when it comes to reducing the impact of harmful falsehoods on its platforms,” the group wrote.
The Oversight Board, which has previously warned Meta that expanding Community Notes outside of the US would come with “significant” risks, also seemed troubled. “We urge Meta not to consider community notes a direct replacement for factchecking, and to use all the tools that best address the challenge of misinformation on its platforms in ways that both protect free expression and address potential harms,” the board said in a statement.
Earlier this year, the group published a 15,000-word policy advisory opinion on how Meta should handle Community Notes’ international expansion. In it, the Oversight Board repeatedly stressed that Community Notes should not replace traditional fact checking. “One doesn’t have to replace or substitute for the other, they can coexist,” board co-chair Paolo Carozza told Engadget at the time. “And in some situations, there are really important reasons for them to coexist.”
In its guidance, the board cautioned against bringing Community Notes to countries experiencing “high polarization,” “protracted conflict” and those with a history of organized disinformation networks. Meta is disregarding that advice, according to the IFCN.
“Meta is testing its community notes in some countries that face precisely one or more of these circumstances. Nicaragua, for example, has abolished elections and is actively practicing arbitrary detention of political dissidents. Disinformation networks have been well documented in El Salvador and Ecuador. And Venezuela has been in an extended state of instability.”
When reached for comment, Meta didn’t address the criticism directly. A spokesperson said there were “no changes to our third-party fact checking program at this time.” The company has said that Community Notes has been a success in the United States, where it has 1.4 million contributors.
Others have raised questions about the effectiveness of Meta’s program compared with X. The publication Indicator found that only 3 percent of Instagram posts that were debunked by the AFP‘s US bureau since last April had also received a Community Note. That would suggest that Meta’s crowd-sourced approach is missing a significant number of social media posts that traditional fact checkers believe are worth addressing.
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