Meta community notes are expected to launch within the next couple of months, after the social network announced it would be ending its own fact-checking program because facts are so 2015. You can now apply to be a contributor to these, signing up on one of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Meantime, X owner Elon Musk appears to be threatening the impartiality of his platform’s community notes, announcing plans to “fix” the feature …
Back in the halcyon days when people cared about whether a claim was true or false, social networks employed professional researchers whose job was to verify claims made on their platforms in order to prevent the spread of misinformation.
After Musk bought X, he dispensed with those in favor of Community Notes, in which other X users can add corrections and context to tweets. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that its own social networks would be doing the same.
We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.
You can apply to join the program here.
Elon Musk apparently isn’t happy with the fact that many of his own tweets have been community noted, as well as those of other users he’s retweeted. In particular, he didn’t like X users correcting Trump’s claim about the approval ratings of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Musk made a false claim that Zelensky controlled the polling, and falsely suggested that the president is refusing to hold elections during the war – when the country’s own law says that he cannot do so, as it would be impossible to hold fair elections under wartime conditions.
Even Musk’s own Grok AI manages to correct him:
The claim that Zelensky “withholds elections” as a dictatorial act doesn’t hold. The postponement of elections, originally due in March 2024, stems from Ukraine’s constitution and the “Martial Law Act” (No. 389-VIII), which prohibits elections during a state of emergency—currently enforced due to Russia’s invasion since February 2022. This decision isn’t Zelensky’s unilateral choice but requires parliamentary approval, renewed every 90 days.
But Musk says he will “fix” use fact-checking.
Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.
Working to fix this …
His tweet follows a comment he made a few months prior, describing community notes as “awesome.”
Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash
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