San Francisco (AFP) - Social media giant Meta on Thursday announced it would begin testing its new “Community Notes” feature across its platforms in the United States next week, as it shifts away from third-party fact-checking toward a crowd-sourced approach to content moderation.

Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the new system – popularized by the Elon Musk-owned platform X – in January as he appeared to align himself with the incoming Trump administration, including naming a Republican as the company’s head of public policy.

The change of system, which Meta will start testing on Tuesday, came after years of criticism from supporters of President Donald Trump, among others, that conservative voices were being censored or stifled under the guise of fighting misinformation, a claim professional fact-checkers vehemently reject.

Meta has also scaled back its diversity initiatives and relaxed content moderation rules on Facebook and Instagram, particularly regarding certain forms of hostile speech.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking scheme.

The initiative will allow users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads to write and rate contextual notes on various content.

Meta said approximately 200,000 potential contributors in the United States have already signed up across the three platforms. The new approach requires contributors to be over 18 with accounts more than six months old that are in good standing.

During the testing period, notes will not immediately appear on content and the company will gradually admit people from the waitlist and thoroughly test the system before public implementation.

- ‘Arbiter of truth’ -

Studies have shown Community Notes can help dispel some falsehoods such as vaccine misinformation, but researchers caution that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus.

Research also shows that Community Notes on X often rely on the findings of professional fact-checking programs, which Meta has scrapped in the United States.

“Meta has long said it doesn’t want to be an ‘arbiter of truth,’ but it has funded those arbiters for the past several years, and it’s not clear whether anyone will step up to replace it,” tech writer Casey Newton wrote in an online commentary.

“If no one does, Community Notes will suffer both on X and on Meta’s platforms.”

Meta’s new approach ignores research that shows Community Notes users are often spurred by “partisan motives” and tend to over-target their political opponents, according to Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech.

Meta, however, emphasized that the notes will only be published when contributors with differing viewpoints agree on their helpfulness.

“This isn’t majority rules,” the company said.

Moreover, unlike fact-checked posts that often had reduced distribution, flagged content with Community Notes will not face distribution penalties.

Notes will be limited to 500 characters, must include supporting links and will initially support six languages commonly used in the United States: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese.

“Our intention is ultimately to roll out this new approach to our users all over the world, but we won’t be doing that immediately,” the company said.

“Until Community Notes are launched in other countries, the third party fact checking program will remain in place for them,” it added.

Meta said that it would not be “reinventing the wheel” and will use X’s open-source algorithm as the basis of its system.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month warned that the rollbacks to fact-checking and moderation safeguards were “reopening the floodgates” of hate and violence online.