The notes of the Meta community will arrive in March

At the beginning of the year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg left everyone with his mouth open when he announced the goal decision to abandon content regulation programs and FACT-CHECKING, introducing a system similar to that adopted by Elon Musk’s social network, X. Three months after the announcement, the giant officializes March 18 as the beginning of her new “community notes” function.

According to the giant, the approach will allow collaborators on-line Write and assign notes to the contents on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, so that users are the ones who provide useful information about the publications shared on the finishing platforms and check the veracity of what is written. At the moment, the test will only affect the US, but the intention that this function climbs to the global plane in the coming months is clear.

Goodbye to FACT-CHECKING

The Meta and Information Verification Program began in the US and then in the rest of the world. According to data from the company itself, since its inception in 2018, there were more than 100 international organizations that actively participated in the FACT-CHECKING. In fact, in 2024, Zuckerberg said that during the parliamentary elections of the European Union, the verification team was highly effective: around 68 million publications on Facebook and Instagram had check labels.

However, the panorama changed dramatically on January 7 of last year, When Joel Kaplan, recently appointed Director of Global Meta, announced the end of the Program in the USA. According to the entrance to his Official Blogthe decision had been made to “allow more issues to be discussed openly on the company’s platforms.” In a video that accompanied the statement, Zuckerberg said the new policies would mean the return of more political content to the feeds of the people, as well as publications on other issues that have lit the cultural wars in the US in recent years.

The goal decision was strongly criticized by the different media in the US and Latin America, which warned of the serious danger of delegating responsibility for citizens in the work of verifying facts. Wired in Spanish reported some of the possible affected: Political Animal, in Mexico; Checking, in Argentina; Magnifying, or Aos Fatos, in Brazil, and Maldita.es, in Spain.

Hispanic data verifiers react to the closing of the program of FACT-CHECKING Meta in the US

The ghost of misinformation lurks again to Facebook, Threads and Instagram. How did we return here?

How community notes will work

The decision to get away from FACT-CHECKING And adopting the Community model Notes (community notes) of X, means that users will have to provide informative context to the potentially deceptive contents published on the different goal platforms. That is, the company will not be the one who decides what is evaluated or writes, but the community.

“To avoid biases, the notes will not be published unless collaborators with different points of view are widely agreed,” says Meta. Specifically, The notes will be published on social networks anonymously, will have a maximum extension of 500 characters and will contain a link that supports the information provided.