The concept of community ratings on Facebook and Instagram is taking shape. Here’s how they should work.
The start of 2025 is marked by some shocking announcements from Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that it would be relaxing hateful content policies on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, as well as moving away from fact-checking in favor of X-inspired Community Ratings. This new, more flexible approach to combating misinformation will be rolled out first in the United States before expanding to other regions. Here’s what Meta’s Community Ratings look like.
How will community ratings work on Facebook and Instagram?
Community notes on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram are directly inspired by those adopted by X and should follow their principle. They will allow users to report if an element of a post is false or to provide more context. If a note is accepted, it will be displayed below the post in question. Instagram’s help page states: “If you see an article that might be inaccurate or confusing, you can write a note with basic information, a tip, or a perspective that people might find useful. Your note may be published if it is deemed useful.” The criteria defining usefulness are not specified. On Elon Musk’s social network, a voting system is used.
In a post published on X, developer Alessandro Paluzzi unveiled the first visuals of community notes, unearthed in the applications’ code. These elements allow us to understand a little more about how they work. To submit a note, you will need to tap “…”, in the top right corner of the publication, then select “write a community note” . The note will be submitted anonymously.
As you likely already know, #Meta is working on Community Notes, and they’ve started implementing it on #Threads 👀
ℹ️ Your note is anonymous and it may get published on the post if it’s rated helpful pic.twitter.com/WjdFDs2WzJ
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) January 13, 2025
Community Ratings: A Highly Questionable Moderation Tool
Since 2016, Meta has been collaborating with professional fact-checkers, usually journalists, whose mission was to flush out attempts at disinformation on platforms. But these are now deemed “too politically biased” by Mark Zuckerberg, who, in the announcement video published on January 7, made a direct link between Meta’s new policy and the election of Donald Trump. By moving away from professional fact-checkers in favor of an approach where majority sentiment prevails, Meta seems to be opening the door to a relative vision of the truth, in the spirit of the “alternative facts” theorized by Donald Trump’s former advisor, Kellyanne Conway, in 2017.
Since the launch of Community Notes on X, numerous flaws have emerged. While the tool does indeed correct misleading posts, it is also regularly misused for activist purposes. Some users use it to post misleading information or to pass off ideological views as established truths. In its help page, Meta states that Community Notes “will allow people with different perspectives to decide whether posts are potentially misleading and should be put into context .” The tool could therefore become a new political battleground.
