Meta Gets Called Out by Its Own Oversight Board for Rickety Community Notes
The meta week of bad news continued when its own supervisory board issued an assessment of the company’s plans to continue avoid third-party fact-checking on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and replaces it with community notes in countries outside the United States. The results were not positive.
Community Notes launched in early 2025 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 affected countries, including volatile disinformation that could influence elections, exacerbate global conflicts and contribute to human rights abuses.
The company asked the supervisory board to review its plans to expand Community Notes outside the United States and determine whether certain countries should be excluded. The Board’s assessment is that the Community Notes program fails to eliminate misinformation from Meta’s platforms.
“Delays in releasing notes, the limited number of notes published, and their reliance on the reliability of the broader information environment raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully combat harm-related misinformation,” the report said.
According to the assessment, problems with community ratings could be particularly dangerous in countries with repressive regimes, where elections could be influenced by disinformation, where there are coordinated disinformation networks, where linguistic complexities cannot be handled by Meta’s technology, where there are barriers to internet access, and where major conflicts are taking place or where there is a risk of political violence. These are places where the board recommends that Meta omit or reconsider its plans to use community ratings 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 respond publicly to the board’s recommendations within 60 days with an update to its message.
Meta’s big moderation change
Meta relied on third-party fact-checkers for more than a decade before deciding to move to community ratings on platforms like Facebook. The move was widely seen as political, aimed at currying favor with the Trump administration.
As Neiman Labs reports and as the Oversight Board report points out, community notes have inherent problems: community members have little incentive to post them, their release is often delayed, and has not been thoroughly tested because the program is still considered to be in beta.
There have also been far fewer community notes published than actions taken under fact-checking programs. There have been around 900 notes posted in the United States, compared to 35 million labels applied to Facebook posts across the European Union since Community Notes rolled out.
In addition to the damning supervisory board report, Meta also lost two lawsuits this week, one in New Mexico And one in Californiafollowing 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 abandonment of fact-checking as part of the “Great Retreat,” which it called “a trend in which the world’s most powerful technology companies have walked back previous commitments to combating disinformation.”
