Context notes: what is this tool that Meta wants to implement?

Meta announced on Tuesday that it will end the digital verification program in USA to replace it with a context notes system, similar to the one used by the social network X.

How do context notes work?

Context notes are a collective content moderation tool. They appear below some potentially misleading posts.

Twitter has been using them since 2021 and in 2022 they were widespread on the social network, bought by Elon Musk in 2022 and renamed X.

The notes are proposed and written by volunteer users, who must previously register, and are not edited by the X teams.

Afterwards, “other users will evaluate whether the note is useful or not, according to different criteria, such as the relevance of the sources and the clarity of the information,” Lionel Kaplan, president of the social media content creation agency, told AFP. Dicenda.

“If there are enough positive evaluations of the note, it will appear below the tweet to provide additional information,” he explained.

Ratings “take into account not only the number of contributors who rated a post as useful or unhelpful, but also whether the people who rated it appear to come from a variety of backgrounds,” X explains on its website.

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The principle is the same as in Wikipedia. “We rely on the most active users of a social network or platform to increase the quality of content,” Kaplan added.

Meta, which announced that its notes program will be similar to that of X, considers it a “less partial” system than fact-checking.

What are the risks?

Facebook has a fact-checking program in more than 26 languages ​​that remunerates more than 80 media outlets in the world, including the AFP, to use their “fact-checks” on its platform, on WhatsApp and on Instagram.

With ratings, “the problem is that verification depends on the crowd,” says Christine Balagué, professor at the Mines-Télécom Institute and founder of the “Good in Tech” research network, which works on disinformation.

“The crowd may say the right thing, but there may also be malicious people who are there to spread misinformation,” he says.

“This decision will affect users who want accurate and reliable information,” Angie Drobnic Holan, US head of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), comments in X.

“Fact-checkers have never shown bias in their work and these criticisms come from people who think they can exaggerate the facts and lie without being refuted or contradicted,” he added, highlighting the climate of political pressure in the United States on the eve of the inauguration. of President-elect Donald Trump.

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Bill Adair, co-founder of the IFCN network, said it is “disturbing to see Mark Zuckerberg echoing political attacks on fact-checkers because he knows that those who participated in his program were signatories to a charter of principles that demand transparency and impartiality.” .

Trump, who has been especially critical of Meta and his boss in recent years, accusing the company of progressive bias, said he “probably” influenced the decision.

Are ratings effective against misinformation?

Researchers showed that context notes “reduce the spread of misinformation by around 20%” on the X network, admitted Christine Balagué.

And although this system “is not 100% reliable,” Lionel Kaplan believes that the context notes are effective.

He believes that they allow a greater volume of information to be processed than fact-checking, which is “cumbersome to apply.” It also points to a “democratic” functioning, which allows “having and confronting different points of view.”

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X, however, is regularly accused of allowing misinformation to spread since Elon Musk drastically reduced moderation teams.

But, according to this expert, it is mainly because “X encourages radicalism” and, consequently, makes false information more visible than in other places.

Meta indicated that users could begin signing up as early as Monday to write notes when the program launches, without giving details about participation criteria.

The company also announced that it will give users more control over how much political content they want to see on Facebook, Instagram or Threads.

It remains to be seen whether this system will increase the spread of false information. According to Kaplan, Meta is not necessarily interested in highlighting controversial content as it could upset advertisers.