Community Notes Can't Save Social Media From Itself

It is not enough for Musk and Zuckerberg to hide behind the crowd. They need to remove the incentives that spur the spread of misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.

- Dave Lee and Carolyn Silverman

The billionaire leaders of social media giants have long been under pressure to quell the spread of mis- and disinformation. No system to date, from human fact-checkers to automation, has satisfied critics on the left or the right.

One novel approach winning plaudits recently has been Community Notes. The crowdsourced method, first introduced by Twitter before Mr. Elon Musk acquired it and rebranded it as X, allows regular users to submit additional context to posts, offering up supporting evidence to set the record straight. For Mr. Musk, the system is the centerpiece of his "free speech" claims, a democracy that circumvents traditional gatekeepers of information. "You are the media," he tells his 220 million followers.

Starting this week, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms will broadly expand the method when it begins testing its own Community Notes system for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, citing X as its inspiration.

In what was seen as a controversial about-face after years of paying professional fact-checkers, Mr. Zuckerberg said its existing initiatives had become "too politically biased." An army of volunteer users would do a "better job," he said. YouTube began testing a version of Community Notes on its site in June.

The system has advantages over the alternatives, but its limits as an antidote to misinformation are clear. So are its benefits for executives who have been dogged by intense scrutiny over misinformation and censorship for the better part of a decade. It allows them to outsource responsibility for what happens on their platforms to their users. And also the blame.

A Bloomberg Opinion analysis of 1.1 million Community Notes written in English, from the start of 2023 to February 2025, shows that the system has fallen well short of counteracting the incentives, both political and financial, for lying, and allowing people to lie, on X.