Social media companies are increasingly relying on fact-checks written by their users, allowing companies to step back from politically loaded decisions about what content to take down.
Elon Musk’s X, which stopped using employees to fact-check posts, relies heavily on its users to police its site for misinformation in a program called Community Notes. YouTube has also begun testing a similar feature, although it uses third-party evaluators to determine whether the corrective notes are helpful.
The decisions to move away from strict rules about what is allowed on the sites and employing thousands of content moderators to police them follows yearslong complaints from Republicans that social media companies effectively censored conservative voices. And, despite the companies’ moderation efforts, many social media researchers still found myriad posts containing rule-breaking content.
X’s Community Notes began before Mr. Musk acquired the company in 2022. But Mr. Musk aggressively accelerated the program and largely did away with the fact-checking labels the company had once applied to misleading posts about hot-button issues like elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, nodded to X’s influence in his announcement. “We’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Mr. Musk, responding in a post on X on Tuesday, said, “This is cool.”
Community Notes allows users who participate in the program to write fact-checks for any post on X. The approach works for topics on which there is broad consensus, researchers have found. But users with differing political viewpoints have to agree on a fact-check before it is publicly appended to a post, which means that misleading posts about politically divisive subjects often go unchecked.
MediaWise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, found in July that only about 6 percent of the drafted Community Notes on posts about immigration became public, and only 4 percent of drafted fact-checks on posts about abortion were published.
The program has also added fact-checking labels to X posts that turned out to be accurate. During hurricane season, Community Notes participants incorrectly labeled storm forecasts as inaccurate.
Keith Coleman, a vice president of product at X who oversees the Community Notes program, said in a recent interview with Asterisk Magazine that social media users distrusted companies’ fact-checking.
“A lot of people just did not want a tech or media company deciding what was or was not misleading,” Mr. Coleman said. “So even if you could put labels on content, if people think it’s biased, they’re not likely to be very informed by it.”
