Major tech company reveals their upcoming feature aims to be ‘less partial’ in comparison to their existing third-party fact-checking service.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled the changes in content moderation in January, amid a series of efforts by major tech firms to align with former US President Donald Trump’s administration.
This decision came after repeated claims by conservative groups that fact-checking endeavors frequently mislabeled accurate viewpoints as misinformation due to political or ideological motives.
Although Trump and many conservatives praised Meta’s move, experts in misinformation expressed concerns that it could exacerbate the spread of false information online.
In a blog post on Thursday, Meta stated that incorporating X’s technology for Community Notes will enable the company “to enhance its functionality across our platforms over time”.
“We will continue to refine it as we gather insights from user contributions and observe its effectiveness in our services. While the process will not be perfect, we are committed to making continuous improvements.”
Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, declared that it will start testing the new feature on March 18. They have already seen interest from 200,000 potential contributors who have signed up to help verify content on their platforms.
Notes will only be published if they are deemed to be accurate by a variety of contributors, aiming to offer diverse perspectives.
“We are confident that Community Notes will be more impartial and capable of handling a larger volume of content than the third-party fact-checking program it is set to replace,” Meta stated.
“In 2016, when we initiated the fact-checking program, we recognized that we didn’t want the responsibility of determining the truth and opted to seek the expertise of fact-checking organizations as the best possible solution.”
The feature is set to be rolled out across the US following beta testing, with plans to eventually make it available to all users on a global scale.
