Meta Oversight Board thinks Community Notes are inadequate as a standalone solution for addressing harmful misinformation
Last year, Meta requested guidance from the Oversight Board on what it should consider when deciding whether any country should be omitted from its planned expansion of community notes outside the United States.
‘Community Notes’ is a community-based approach to provide context or correction to false information online. It is a system used by X and is now being trialled by Meta in the US, alongside the company dropping its fact-checking programme there.
Full Fact Full Fact sent written evidence and joined one of the stakeholder events to provide additional expert evidence. We are widely cited in the opinion, published today.
We welcome the Oversight Board’s clear view that that community notes alone cannot fulfil content moderation requirements for harmful disinformation:
“Insofar as Meta envisions community notes as its primary way to address misinformation… the Board finds that the program’s design may limit its ability to accomplish that goal. 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”.
Although the scope of Meta's request was narrow, the Oversight Board still found ways to highlight how important it is that Meta continues to work with fact checkers. It cited research showing that community notes cannot match professional fact-checking across scale and speed.
We are also pleased to see our emphasis on harm reflected in the opinion. Some claims made online are more harmful than others, and Full Fact has been working with academics and civil society partners to develop a common terminology. Unlike the community notes systems used by X and Meta, fact checkers focus on the most harmful misinformation as part of our commissioning criteria. Platforms have the power to integrate our work and where needed, amplify it to ensure that fact checks reach as many people as possible, and counteract the harm done by misinformation online.
We all value independent expertise in other walks of life, and this should be no different. Fact checking organisations around the world play a vital role in helping to ensure that people have access to accurate information, enabling them to make informed choices on the issues that matter to them.
Read what the European Fact Checking Standards Network said here.
You can watch the Oversight Board's response to Meta's expansion of community notes below:
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