Facebook, Instagram beta testing Community Notes in the U.S.

Meta will soon roll out its new fact-checking replacement, Community Notes, a crowd-sourced tool that will sunset the company's third party fact-checking team in favor of what Meta alleges is a "less biased" way to curb misinformation.

The company announced that the feature will begin testing among U.S. users on March 18, but Community Notes won't yet appear to the public while in beta testing. Once they do show up, users can expect to see small highlighted boxes at the bottom of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads posts, as well as options to contribute their own notes in the drop down menus on all Meta platforms. Notes will not have author names attached to them and will be capped at 500 words.

"We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces because it allows more people with more perspectives to add context to posts," the company wrote. "This isn’t majority rules. No matter how many contributors agree on a note, it won’t be published unless people who normally disagree decide that it provides helpful context. "

Meta's approach is based entirely on the Community Notes feature that's become central to fact-checking at Elon Musk-owned X. Meta says it will use X's open source algorithm as the basis of its own rating system, with the potential to build out the feature as its deployed. "As X’s algorithm and program information is open source – meaning free and available for anyone to use – we can build on what X has done, learn from the researchers who have studied it, and improve the system for our own platforms," Meta explained. "We won’t be reinventing the wheel."

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the policy shift in January, saying: "Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created... It's time to get back to our roots around free expression."

In February, the company opened up applications for what they're calling a "Community Notes network" of fact-checking contributors on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Contributors had to be 18 years or older, have an account at least six months old, and be in good standing. Meta said more than 200,000 people signed up across the company's three platforms and were added to a pending waitlist — many will be notified that they have been accepted as contributors in the coming days.

Meta also confirmed that Community Notes won't apply to paid advertisements for the time being, a decision initially leaked by an anonymous source in January that stirred greater concern over the company's evolving moderation and hateful conduct policies in the name of free speech. Posts that are tagged with a note won't receive any kind of penalty, either, such as the reduced visibility built into Meta's previous fact-checking system.