Meta’s Oversight Board warns that 'Community Notes' aren’t a proper substitute for fact-checking globally

On Thursday, Meta’s Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body that reviews the social media giant’s moderation practices, ruled that “Community Notes” are not a proper substitute for its fact-checking program.

In a new “policy advisory opinion,” the Board expressed concerns about how effective Community Notes would be in a litany of circumstances, “including in repressive human rights regimes, in particular electoral contexts and in ongoing crisis and conflict situations.” Overall, the Board warned that expanding Community Notes outside the U.S. could “pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy.”

In January 2025, Meta announced it was getting rid of its fact-checking program in the U.S. Launched a decade ago, the program relied on a network of third-party fact-checkers to verify content and flag disinformation. These partnerships with news and civil society organizations have been essential to the platform’s moderation practices on Meta, Instagram, and Threads.

In place of proper fact-checkers, Meta has rolled out Community Notes in the U.S., which rely on crowdsourced, user-generated footnotes to label content that is false or misleading. The decision coincided with the beginning of the second Trump administration and an explosion of AI-generated imagery on Meta’s platforms.

While Community Notes started stateside, the company also announced last year that it has plans to expand the program globally. That’s where the Oversight Board has stepped in. The Board was asked by Meta last fall to review whether certain countries or territories should be omitted from the expansion, and issue more general recommendations on the global rollout.

In addition to cautioning Meta from using Community Notes in the many countries worldwide that meet its criteria for concern, the Board also outlined several structural problems in the Community Notes model. For one, it creates little incentive not to post false or misleading content. The Board found in its review that there are “no strikes for posting content that receives a community note,” and more tellingly, there are no punitive effects on reach or monetization of posts.

The Board also found that crowdsourcing moderation would inevitably “privilege dominant political, ethnic, or minority groups.” It’s a concern that should not be taken lightly given the company’s past complicity in the genocide of minority groups in Myanmar and Ethiopia through failures to moderate hateful content. Back in 2018, Facebook apologized for its role in “offline violence” in Myanmar.

“Delays in note publication, the limited number of published notes and its dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm,” wrote the board.

The Board stopped short of recommending that Meta end the Community Notes program entirely, instead writing that more “sufficient testing and detailed data” would be required for an evaluation. Regardless, it is worth noting that Meta is not legally required to comply with any of the Board’s recommendations, and that it has only implemented them in about 75% of cases.

The Board’s opinion has already put some renewed pressure on Meta to halt its global Community Notes rollout, and even to restore its fact-checking program in the U.S.

“The Oversight Board advises Meta not to expand community notes in countries and contexts that are particularly fraught, because community notes can be manipulated by large groups,” Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network (and a 2023 Nieman Fellow) wrote in a post on Poynter. “Isn’t the United States today a place experiencing one or more of those conditions?”

In the first six months of its U.S. rollout, Meta’s chief information security officers said that its platforms have only published 900 Community Notes. By comparison, Holan notes that in the same period across the E.U., professional fact-checkers helped Meta apply labels on roughly 35 million Facebook posts.

“Meta should restore professional fact-checking for the benefit of the American public, and it should do it before the next election cycle,” she wrote.

You can read the full Oversight Board advisory opinion here.