Post Content The logo of Meta is seen at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (File Photo: Reuters/Gonzalo Fuentes)
Meta should delay the rollout of its Community Notes feature in countries outside the United States, its own advisory board said on Thursday, March 26, citing concerns over language complexity, internet shutdowns, and the presence of large-scale disinformation networks.
The Meta Oversight Board, a semi-independent body that reviews the company’s content takedown decisions and suggests policy improvements, also warned that expanding Community Notes to countries with repressive governments or facing ongoing conflict could pose serious human rights risks and lead to real-world harm.
In addition, Meta should not introduce Community Notes in countries approaching major elections, especially where there are risks to the integrity of political institutions, the Board said. These recommendations by the Oversight Board are meant to serve as criteria for when Meta should withhold or delay launching Community Notes in a particular country.
The Board’s proposed framework comes more than a year after Meta announced that it will eliminate fact-checks posted by third-party fact-checkers in the US, replacing them with a Community Notes system similar to that of Elon Musk-owned X. At the time, Meta said it planned to expand Community Notes to other countries, raising concerns among its fact-checking partners in India that count on revenue from Meta as a key source of survival.
Oversight Board member Sudhir Krishnaswamy, who is also the Vice Chancellor at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), said that Meta should avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to a global rollout of Community Notes.
“In India, linguistic diversity and multidimensional social and political polarisation calls for a Community Notes model that ensures adequate user participation across diverse languages and verifiable mitigation strategies to address complex non-binary social and political divisions,” Krishnaswamy told The Indian Express.
India is one of the largest markets for Meta’s platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp, which recorded more than 500 million monthly active users last year. “Going by the listed criteria, it would appear that India would qualify as among the countries where Community Notes should not be introduced,” Karen Rebelo, a former fact-checker and independent journalist, said.
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Although the criteria were developed by the Oversight Board at Meta’s own request, the Facebook and Instagram parent is not obligated to adopt them unlike the Board’s content moderation rulings which are binding. However, Meta is required to publicly respond to each of the Board’s recommendations within 30 days, as per its website. To be sure, the Oversight Board is funded by Meta but claims to operate independently.
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These recommendations could also serve as a framework for other platforms considering crowdsourced approaches like Community Notes. “As Meta, X, YouTube, TikTok and other platforms increasingly adopt crowdsourced approaches to address potentially misleading content, they have a responsibility to undertake comprehensive human rights due diligence with robust strategies to prevent potential harms in different contexts,” said Paolo Carozza, the Oversight Board’s co-chair.
“There must be ongoing data gathering, substantial transparency and access to data for researchers so that the performance of these programs can be fully assessed,” Carozza added.
The Meta Oversight Board said it consulted a range of stakeholders, including fact-checkers, journalists, and civil society organisations for observations and data on the effectiveness of different Community Notes-style moderation systems (including X’s) across different contexts.
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Based on its analysis, the Board acknowledged that crowdsourcing fact-checks on social media posts “could enhance users’ freedom of expression and improve online discourse if implemented with sufficient scale, speed and safeguards against manipulations.”
However, it found that Community Notes cannot be the primary method for handling misinformation that does not qualify for post removal or account suspension under Meta’s rules. “Delays in note publication, limited published notes in number and its dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm,” the Board said.
The advisory body also flagged the lack of data and sufficient testing to know how Community Notes functions in real-world situations and in relation to other misinformation tools. “For that reason, the Board also recommends ongoing data gathering, assessment and reporting regarding the functionality of community notes, related to those criteria,” it added.
