While much has been made of Meta’s switch to an X-style Community Notes system for content moderation, in replacement of third-party fact checkers, the company has been taking a cautionary approach to rolling out Community Notes, with only the U.S. switched over to a Community Notes system as yet.
But Meta is planning to expand Community Notes to more regions, and ahead of this, the company has called on its independent Oversight Board to assess its approach to Community Notes, and advise on the best way to roll out the system to more users.
Or not, as it may be.
As per the Oversight Board:
“Meta has requested the Board’s guidance on the factors it should consider when deciding whether any country should be omitted from its community notes expansion, as contextual elements may impact the program’s operations. Additionally, Meta has asked the Board how to weigh those factors in relation to one another, in a way that can be applied on a large scale.”
Meta’s Community Notes system, replicating X’s approach, enables users to have their say over what is and is not acceptable to be shared in its apps, as opposed to Meta’s own moderation and management teams dictating rules around acceptable discussions.
That takes the onus of platform management from making tough calls on potential content censorship, which became a bigger point of contention after COVID 19, following broad-scale efforts to silence the anti-vax movement.
Indeed, the pandemic is what’s sparked a whole new freedom of speech movement, which was amplified further by Elon Musk buying up Twitter, and seeking to remove previous restrictions around certain discussion topics.
Freedom of speech has been a key tenet of the Trump Administration, which is seemingly why Meta has opted to also change its approach, in order to better align with the Trump team.
And while crowd-sourcing moderation does make sense to some degree, there are also various factors that can impede the effectiveness of this approach, including the need to weed out political bias in crowd-voting on what should and should not be noted.
Which is one of the key elements that the Oversight Board will consider:
“In its request, Meta states that the algorithm calculates this score by identifying agreement that a note is helpful among a sufficient number of contributors who usually disagree with each other based on past ratings. According to Meta, if the combined ‘helpful consensus’ score on a note exceeds a ‘certain threshold’ and the note does not violate Meta’s Community Standards, the note will be published.”
Community Notes are then displayed at the bottom of the post in question, which users can then tap/click to read the full note and supporting link.
The implementation of cross-ideological bias testing is a necessary element, as it stops groups from mass voting down notes that they disagree with, however it also impedes many notes that are helpful from being shown. Because on some issues, there’s no chance of reaching agreement between these two groups.
That means that on some of the most divisive, harmful topics, community notes are never displayed, even though notes have been submitted. This has been highlighted as a critical flaw on X, and while Meta says that the implementation of Community Notes has led to a significant reduction in enforcement mistakes, the issue remains an impediment, which will continue to allow such updates to be shown at scale, without any additional context, across Meta’s apps.
The Oversight Board will assess this element as part of its investigation into effective Notes approaches, while also looking into whether Meta should look to maintain third-party fact-checking as a safeguard against such limits.
The investigation is likely to highlight these concerns, which could see Meta delay, or even shelve its plans for a broader roll-out of Community Notes.
And in some ways, that seems like it may even be the plan. If Meta can delay an expanded roll-out for long enough, maybe, it can actually avoid implementing Community Notes altogether in more regions, as it will appear to be aligning with the Trump Administration’s approach, while actually sticking to its existing moderation strategies in every other region.
Maybe that’s another consideration within this Oversight Board review, in delaying implementation to potentially avoid a broader roll out, and exacerbating the flaws of crowd-sourcing moderation.
