Oversight Board asks Meta not to replace fact-checking with Community Notes

Meta's Oversight Board asked the company not to replace fact-checking with Community Notes, according to a statement seen by AFP overnight Friday, after it said it was testing the crowdsourcing system in Latin America.

Facebook, Instagram and Threads users in 16 Spanish-speaking countries in the region have been able to sign up since Wednesday to provide context to online posts, which will remain invisible to others under the pilot program.

The crowdsourced notes system, modeled on the one used by Elon Musk's X, is designed to supplant checks carried out by accredited newsrooms and fact-checking agencies.

Meta gave no timeline for when the change will become official, saying only that full rollout would come when it was confident the product worked.

However, Meta's Oversight Board, the quasi-independent body the company funds to review its moderation decisions, said Community Notes was not an adequate replacement for fact-checking and that the two practices serve "distinct purposes."

"We urge Meta not to consider community notes a direct replacement for fact-checking, and to use all the tools that best address the challenge of misinformation on its platforms in ways that both protect free expression and address potential harms," the board said in a statement dated Thursday.

While Community Notes can "add information to important debates and boost free expression," they can also "contribute to real-world harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy," the board said.

It added that Community Notes often rely on fact-checking.

The board warned in March that the global rollout of Community Notes risked human rights harms in politically polarized countries and during tense elections.

The countries included in Meta's pilot are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Portuguese-speaking Brazil, the region's largest market for Meta's platforms, was excluded from the crowdsourcing trial.

AFP is among the fact-checking organizations that participate in Meta's program in Latin America and elsewhere, verifying information in 26 languages.

- 'Not enough' -

The company's pivot came while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on a trip to the region, visiting countries whose leaders now align with President Donald Trump's policies.

It follows a run of elections that have seen right-wing politicians, who are typically more favorable to digital deregulation, make huge gains across Latin America.

The new leaders rely on social media to burnish their images and spread disinformation. In some cases, they have been accused of deploying troll armies to simulate popular support.

Meta founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg announced last year, days before Trump took office for a second term, that the company was ending its US fact-checking partnerships and replacing them with Community Notes.

Zuckerberg, in line with Republican views, cast the shift as a return to free expression.

The pilot program has drawn criticism from the world's main fact-checking network.

"The community notes program alone is simply not adequate when it comes to reducing the impact of harmful falsehoods on social media platforms," said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, of which AFP is a signatory.

LatamChequea, a network of 47 regional verification initiatives, also asked Meta to rethink its decision, calling on the tech giant "to complement, not replace, independent verification."

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