Community Notes Can’t Save Social Media From Itself
Eliminating the rewards for promoting misinformation would go much further than crowdsourcing to clean up social media. But in a social media world of growing incentives to make money, Community Notes is ultimately fighting a losing battle, as both Elon Musk (left) and Mark Zuckerberg explore models on their respective platforms.
Bloomberg
The billionaire leaders of social media giants have long been under pressure to quell the spread of mis- and disinformation. No system to date, from human fact-checkers to automation, has satisfied critics on the left or the right.
One novel approach winning plaudits recently has been Community Notes. The crowdsourced method, first introduced by Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it and rebranded it as X, allows regular users to submit additional context to posts, offering up supporting evidence to set the record straight. For Musk, the system is the centerpiece of his “free speech” claims, a democracy that circumvents traditional gatekeepers of information. “You are the media,” he tells his 220 million followers.
Starting Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. will broadly expand the method when it begins testing its own Community Notes system for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, citing X as its inspiration. In what was seen as a controversial about-face after years of paying professional fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said its existing initiatives had become “too politically biased.” An army of volunteer users would do a “better job,” he said. YouTube began testing a version of Community Notes on its site in June.
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