Meta unveils new com­mu­ni­ty notes pro­gram; will not apply dis­tri­b­u­tion penal­ties nor lim­it flow of infor­ma­tion

EXCLUSIVE: Meta is launch­ing its new com­mu­ni­ty notes pro­gram next week to replace its biased, third-par­ty fact-check­ing pro­gram.

The company’s glob­al affairs offi­cer, Joel Kaplan, told Fox News Dig­i­tal in an exclu­sive inter­view that con­tent with com­mu­ni­ty notes applied will not be lim­it­ed in dis­tri­b­u­tion to users nor have penal­ties imposed. 

Meta, in Jan­u­ary, end­ed its fact-check­ing pro­gram and lift­ed restric­tions on speech on the plat­form to “restore free expres­sion” across Face­book, Insta­gram and Meta plat­forms. Meta said its con­tent mod­er­a­tion prac­tices had “gone too far.” 

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“We had a third-par­ty, fact-check­ing pro­gram, which was well-inten­tioned at the begin­ning but proved to be real­ly prone to par­ti­san polit­i­cal bias and destroyed a lot of trust and cred­i­bil­i­ty in the sys­tem,” Kaplan said. “We decid­ed to replace that sys­tem, start­ing in the Unit­ed States with a crowd­sourced, com­mu­ni­ty-based approach, which we announced in Jan­u­ary.” 

Next week, Meta is open­ing the new com­mu­ni­ty notes pro­gram for users to write and rate notes on con­tent across Face­book, Insta­gram and Threads. 

“We’ve devel­oped a wait­list that actu­al­ly has a cou­ple of hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple on it, a broad cross-sec­tion of Amer­i­cans who use Face­book and Insta­gram who want to be able to add con­text to the con­tent that they are see­ing when they think it is mis­lead­ing,” Kaplan said. “And the great thing about com­mu­ni­ty notes is that, first of all, instead of a hand­ful of so-called experts like the third-par­ty fact-check­ers, it’s our com­mu­ni­ty, which is broad based, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly diverse peo­ple from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum.”

Meta will begin by grad­u­al­ly and ran­dom­ly admit­ting peo­ple off the wait­list and will take time to test the writ­ing and rat­ing sys­tem before any notes are pub­lished.

Meta will not decide what gets rat­ed or what gets writ­ten but rather the con­trib­u­tors from the Face­book, Insta­gram and Threads com­mu­ni­ties, the com­pa­ny told Fox News Dig­i­tal. 

Kaplan told Fox News Dig­i­tal that Meta is bor­row­ing the algo­rithm used by X, which the com­pa­ny has open-sourced from its sys­tem. 

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“The algo­rithm only applies a com­mu­ni­ty note when peo­ple who nor­mal­ly dis­agree agree that some­thing is mis­lead­ing,” Kaplan said. “And that’s the way that you ensure that the bias that crept into the third-par­ty fact-check­ing sys­tem isn’t a part of this sys­tem.” 

Kaplan said all con­tent is sub­ject to com­mu­ni­ty notes, except for adver­tise­ments. But con­trib­u­tors can sub­mit notes on almost any oth­er form of con­tent, includ­ing posts by Meta, Meta exec­u­tives, politi­cians and oth­er pub­lic fig­ures. 

“Anoth­er thing that it won’t do that the third-par­ty fact-check­ing pro­gram did is it doesn’t apply any penal­ty,” Kaplan explained. 

“The third-par­ty fact-check­ing pro­gram, in addi­tion to the bias, had penal­ties attached to it, where if some­thing was rat­ed false, we would dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce its dis­tri­b­u­tion,” Kaplan con­tin­ued. “And that turned a pro­gram that was intend­ed to be about pro­vid­ing addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion into one that was essen­tial­ly a cen­sor­ship tool.”

Meta’s third-par­ty fact-check­ing pro­gram was put in place after the 2016 elec­tion and had been used to “man­age con­tent” and mis­in­for­ma­tion on its plat­forms, large­ly due to “polit­i­cal pres­sure,” exec­u­tives said, but they admit­ted the sys­tem had “gone too far.”

“The com­mu­ni­ty notes pro­gram is just about pro­vid­ing addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion and con­text so peo­ple can make their own deci­sions, but it doesn’t apply any dis­tri­b­u­tion penal­ties or lim­it the flow of infor­ma­tion through the algo­rithm,” Kaplan said.

Under the third-par­ty fact-check­ing pro­gram, fact-checked posts often had their dis­tri­b­u­tion reduced across plat­forms. Meta said that will not be the case with posts that have com­mu­ni­ty notes applied to them, and it will not affect who can see the con­tent or how wide­ly it can be shared. 

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Kaplan said Meta believes users “should see both the posts and then also the addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion to give them con­text about the post.” 

“We want to make sure that the full range of infor­ma­tion is pro­vid­ed,” he said.

The com­mu­ni­ty notes will be lim­it­ed to 500 char­ac­ters and will be writ­ten by con­trib­u­tors in the Meta com­mu­ni­ty notes pro­gram. 

“Indi­vid­ual mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty will write and sub­mit notes, and then oth­er mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty will get to say, ‘Yeah, that looks right to me,’ with­in the sys­tem,” he said. “And once the algo­rithm deter­mines that it received a crit­i­cal mass of sup­port from peo­ple who usu­al­ly dis­agree, that is the check on the bias.”

“All the changes we made in Jan­u­ary were in the ser­vice of return­ing to our roots of free expres­sion, and the third-par­ty fact-check­ing pro­gram has become an imped­i­ment to that,” Kaplan said. “A com­mu­ni­ty-based sys­tem that empow­ers our users to just pro­vide addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion that peo­ple find help­ful, I think, is a real­ly big improve­ment on voice and expres­sion on the plat­form.” 

As for who can con­tribute com­mu­ni­ty notes, Meta told Fox News Dig­i­tal that con­trib­u­tors must be over 18 years old and have an account that is more than six months old and in good stand­ing. The user must also have either a ver­i­fied phone num­ber or be enrolled in two-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion.

The com­mu­ni­ty notes fea­ture will be avail­able in six lan­guages com­mon­ly used in the Unit­ed States to start, includ­ing Eng­lish, Span­ish, Chi­nese, Viet­namese, French and Por­tuguese. Meta will expand to oth­er lan­guages down the line.