Meta Expands Community Notes Feature, Adding Alerts for Users

Meta announced a major expansion of its fact-checking program Community Notes on September 10, introducing notifications and broader user participation features — another step in the social network’s evolving approach to fact-checking and a move away from traditional methods, TechCrunch reports.

The updates, announced by Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen, allow any user to rate the usefulness of Community Notes or request fact-checks for posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Most importantly, the platform will now notify users when corrective Community Notes are added to posts they previously liked, reposted, or commented on — a measure aimed at addressing the issue of “zombie reposts,” where misinformation continues to spread even after being debunked.

Since Community Notes launched in the U.S. earlier this year, more than 70,000 contributors have written over 15,000 notes, but only about 6% have been published. This low publication rate reflects challenges similar to those faced by the system on X, where notes become visible to users only after consensus is reached between different political groups.

Expanding Democratic Participation

The new features democratize Meta’s fact-checking process by opening up the ability to request and evaluate notes to all users, rather than only approved participants. Previously, only selected volunteers could write Community Notes, which had to be approved by users with historically opposing viewpoints before publication.

Meta says that more than 250,000 participants have joined the Community Notes program, with around 70,000 actively contributing. The company describes these latest changes as “tests,” as it continues to refine its crowdsourced approach.

The notification system is a proactive step in combating misinformation, retroactively informing users when content they interacted with receives corrective context. This addresses the problem of false information often going viral in the first hours after publication, before fact-checking measures can take effect.