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Meta's week of bad news continued when its own oversight board released an assessment of the company's plans to continue avoiding third-party fact-checking on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and replace it with Community Notes in countries outside of the US. The assessment was not positive.
Community Notes launched in early 2025 to replace dedicated fact-checkers with a user-generated system. According to the report, Meta's plans to expand its beta program would have negative effects on the countries affected, including volatile misinformation that could sway elections, exacerbate global conflicts and contribute to human rights violations.
The company requested that the oversight board review its plans to expand Community Notes outside the US and determine whether some countries should be excluded. The board's assessment is that the Community Notes program falls short in helping remove misinformation from Meta's platforms.
"Delays in note publication, the limited number of published notes and its dependence on the broader information environment's reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which Community Notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm," the report says.
The issues with Community Notes, the assessment says, could be particularly dangerous in countries with repressive regimes, where elections could be swayed by misinformation, where there are coordinated disinformation networks, where language complexities can't be handled by Meta's technology, where there are obstacles to internet access, and where major conflicts are happening or there's a danger of political violence. Those are places where the board recommends Meta omit from or reconsider in its plans to use Community Notes rather than third-party fact-checking.
A representative for Meta pointed CNET to an online response from the company in which it says it will publicly respond to recommendations from the board within 60 days with an update to its post.
Meta's big moderation change
Meta relied on third-party fact checkers for more than a decade before deciding to shift to Community Notes on platforms such as Facebook. The move was widely seen as political, to curry favor with the Trump administration.
As Neiman Labs reports and as pointed out in the oversight board report, Community Notes have inherent problems: There's little incentive for community members to post them, they're often delayed in publication and have not been thoroughly tested, as the program is still considered to be in beta.
There have also been far fewer Community Notes posted than there were actions taken from fact-checking programs. There have been about 900 notes posted in the US compared to 35 million labels applied on Facebook posts across the European Union since Community Notes rolled out.
In addition to the damning report from the oversight board, Meta this week also lost two lawsuits, one in New Mexico and one in California, over allegations that its platforms are addictive by design and cause harm to children.
In a recent report, the European Fact-Checking Standards Network described Meta's move away from fact-checking as part of "The Great Retreat," which it called "a trend where the world's most powerful technology companies have backtracked on their previous commitments to combat disinformation."
