What is Community Notes? How does it work? With Meta removing fact-check — all you need to know explained

Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO of Meta Platforms on January 7, announced the company's pivot from professional fact-checking of content to reliance on “Community Notes” type crowdsourced features for posts. Community Notes is a feature kick-started by Elon Musk's X, where users sign up to rate and write notes on posts offering a wide range of perspectives. Facebook, Instagram to Adopt ‘Community Notes’ Zuckerberg in his blog post said the feature as he envisions for Meta's platforms would empower the community to “decide when posts are potentially misleading”. As per an April 2024 paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, a sample of community notes on misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccines “were accurate, cited moderate and high-credibility sources, and were attached to posts viewed hundreds of millions of times” — but the authors did not study the notes' impact on users.