Meta Tests Fact-Check Replacement in Latin America
Meta said 1.4 million U.S. contributors now write notes faster than fact-checkers, as it tests the system in 16 Spanish-speaking countries.
- Meta announced Wednesday it has begun testing Community Notes in 16 Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, a step toward replacing its professional fact-checking program across the region.
- The company hopes this crowdsourced system, modeled on Elon Musk's X, will become the standard way to provide context on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, eventually ending the need for professional fact-checkers.
- Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said she is "deeply concerned" by the decision, warning that the program alone is "not adequate" for reducing harmful falsehoods on social media.
- Less than six months ago, Meta's Oversight Board advised against expanding this program to regions facing societal challenges, including election periods, language complexity, and coordinated disinformation networks.
- While the US program now has more than 1.4 million contributors, AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd noted that community notes only work when contributors can rely on accurate, ethically produced journalism from trusted sources.
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The model is inspired by the system employed by X, the social network owned by Elon Musk. Collaborators propose texts and provide sources; later, other participants value whether these contributions are useful.
The massive collaboration system is designed to replace verifications carried out by data collection and verification agencies.
The initiative comes almost two years after Meta's shutdown of fact-checking in the United States, replaced by this system based on Internet contributions. Several studies have shown that this system is less effective than the work of professionals to combat misinformation.
Meta announced on Wednesday the launch in the testing phase of the "community notes" in 16 Latin American countries, user contributions that are intended to replace the fact-checking on its social networks, raising fears of a resurgence of disinformation.
The Meta group (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) announced Wednesday to test "community notes" in 16 Latin American countries, a device already deployed in the United States to replace its fact-checking program. ...
The initiative comes just under two years after Meta's transition to the "community notes" system in the United States, from fact-checking to the "community notes" system. These notes are produced by referenced users who believe that a message requires clarification or contextualization, most often by joining sources. If enough other contributors, with varying views, consider these notes useful, they will be published on the relevant platform, F…
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Bias Distribution
- 46% of the sources lean Right
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