Meta’s Oversight Board warned against a broader roll-out of the approach its community notes takes to crowd-sourced fact-checking, especially in regions that have poor human rights records, due to concerns that the system could come with significant risks.
The Oversight Board issued its warning in response to a request from Meta to assess potential flaws in the community notes system, which the company implemented in the U.S. in January 2025.
Community notes reduces the power the company has to make calls on what content should be allowed in its apps and puts more onus on the users themselves. The process was first implemented by X in 2024, and has been lauded by X owner Elon Musk as a key step toward giving users more say in what’s acceptable, or not, in social apps.
Following the 2024 U.S. election, Meta announced that it would also be switching to community notes and ending its third-party fact-checking program. Thus far, Meta has only implemented the community notes approach in the U.S., and the Oversight Board advised caution when considering an expansion of the program.
As per the board: “The Oversight Board finds that community notes could enhance users’ freedom of expression and improve online discourse on Meta’s platforms if implemented with sufficient scale, speed and safeguards against manipulations. However, in certain circumstances — including in repressive human rights regimes, in particular electoral contexts and in ongoing crisis and conflict situations — expanding community notes to countries outside the United States could also pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy.”
The board’s view is that community notes could put contributors at risk in certain situations. In addition, the program could allow misinformation to spread in regions where citizens felt that they couldn’t speak up.
The board said delays in note publication, limitations on how many notes can be published and dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability may also restrict the capacity of user-generated annotations to replace third-party fact-checking.
As a result, the Oversight Board said countries with repressive human rights records should be omitted from the initial rollout of community notes “until Meta can demonstrate robust contributor privacy protections.” The board has also advised that Meta should not introduce community notes in advance of or during major elections where significant risks to the integrity of political institutions are present.
Meta hasn’t outlined its expansion plans for Community Notes, despite the option being in place in the U.S. for more than a year. It does seem like Meta is going to take its time with an expanded rollout of the system.
Meta has, however, said that its Community Notes approach is working, and the program’s implementation has led to a 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes in the U.S. But that stat could be misleading, in that if fewer enforcement actions are taking place overall, that could also mean that more potentially harmful comments are getting through.
Which seems likely. According to research conducted by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita in February 2025, 85% of all Community Notes on X are never displayed to users. That’s due to the requirement for consensus between contributors of opposing political ideologies before a note is approved. As such, with so many notes never making it through, logically, there will be fewer mistakes. But it could also mean that misinformation around some of the most divisive political topics is going unchecked.
A broader question here is whether Meta ever intends to expand community notes to more regions. Implementing Community Notes in the U.S. could also have been an effort to placate the Trump Administration, which has long opposed Meta’s perceived political censorship.
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration regarding Meta’s decision to ban his Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021, following the Capitol Riots. As per Politico, in a book published about Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered with his political ambitions again.
As such, it’s not surprising that Meta has made changes to its approach in the U.S. in an effort to better align with Trump’s. But maybe Meta is looking to delay any expansion of community notes until the end of Trump’s term, at which time Meta could revert to its previous fact-checking system.
Either way, the Oversight Board’s warning against a global rollout could see Meta take a more cautious approach.
