Meta didn’t consult its Oversight Board last year when it announced sweeping policy changes to content moderation and a rollback of third-party fact checking in the United States in favor of Community Notes. But the company did ask the board for advice on how to expand the crowd-sourced fact checks to other countries.
Now the Oversight Board is publishing its advice to Meta. In a 15,000-word policy advisory opinion, the group urged Meta to be cautious with an international rollout, warning that an expansion of the program could “pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms” if safeguards are not put in place.
The board, notably, was asked to weigh in on a fairly narrow set of questions, including how it should evaluate whether to withhold the feature in certain countries. Meta “respectfully” asked the Oversight Board to avoid “general” critiques about the system, which it has said is modeled after X.
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In its opinion, the Oversight Board said that Community Notes “could enhance users’ freedom of expression and improve online discourse” with enough safeguard. But it recommended Meta withhold the feature in countries with “high polarization,” as well as countries in the midst of a crisis or “protracted conflict.” The board also said that Meta should avoid countries with a history of organized disinformation networks, because the notes may be more easily manipulated in such places, and countries with “linguistic complexity” that Meta may be ill-equipped to understand.
Depending on how you interpret that advice, that could exclude quite a few countries, though the board stopped short of making country-specific recommendations. Still, it raises questions about how closely Meta will follow the suggested guidelines. For example, the United States could be considered a country with “high polarization.” (Community Notes has been live in the US for more than a year.)
While the Oversight Board was careful to say it “neither endorses nor opposes” an expansion of Community Notes, it did discuss Meta’s approach to fact checking, noting that its partnerships with outside fact-checking organizations are still largely in place outside of the US. And the opinion cautions against ending these relationships, noting that research into Community Notes on X shows that authors writing notes often rely on work done by professional fact checkers.
“Community Notes and fact checking are not mutually exclusive,” Oversight Board member Paolo Carozza tells Engadget. “One doesn’t have to replace or substitute for the other, they can coexist. And in some situations, there are really important reasons for them to coexist. The board really deliberately stayed away from any kind of suggestion that the introduction of Community Notes ought to result in the removal or ending of fact checking.”
