"Mark, Meta, welcome to the party," said X CEO Linda Yaccarino in response to Tuesday's announcement that Meta is replacing fact-checkers with Community Notes.
In a keynote interview with journalist Catherine Herridge at CES 2025, the first thing Herridge asked about was Meta's pivot to the feature that allows users to add notes to posts that might be misleading or inaccurate.
"Think about it as this global collective consciousness, keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time. And it couldn't be more validating than to see that Mark and Meta realized that," responded Yaccarino.
"When you think about Community Notes, Mark and Meta realized that it's the most effective, fastest fact-checking, without bias... also it inspires great behavior. Human behavior is inspired because when a post is noted, it's dramatically shared less, so that's the power of Community Notes," she continued before welcoming Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to the proverbial party.
Despite Yaccarino's depiction of Community Notes as a success story for X, the reality of the program is much different. A 2023 Mashable investigation found several posts with accurate Community Notes were seen by a fraction of users. A 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) came to a similar conclusion finding "74 percent of accurate community notes on U.S. election misinformation never get shown to users" and that "posts without Community Notes promoting false narratives about U.S. politics have garnered billions of views, outpacing the reach of their fact-checked counterparts by 13 times."
So while Community Notes may be a good idea in theory, it hasn't effectively decreased the rampant spread of misinformation and toxic content on X.
Yaccarino said she's excited for Meta's content moderation pivot, but not everyone shares that sentiment. Groups like the aforementioned CCDH, Free Press, and the Real Facebook Oversight Board have spoken out about Meta's shift, saying it's a regressive approach to content moderation and will lead to more misinformation and hateful content on the platform.
"By abandoning its fact-checking program in favor of a discredited 'community notes' system, Meta is turbocharging the spread of unchallenged online lies, worsening the spread of hate, and creating more risks to our communities, democracy, public health, and the safety of our kids," CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said in a press statement on Tuesday.
"Meta is now saying it’s up to you to spot the lies on its platforms, and that it’s not their problem if you can’t tell the difference, even if those lies, hate, or scams end up hurting you. Rather than stepping up to the challenge of responsible platform governance, Meta is retreating from accountability. This is huge step back for online safety, transparency, and accountability, and it could have terrible offline consequences in the form of real-world harm."
UPDATE: Jan. 8, 2025, 7:00 p.m. UTC Added statement from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
