TikTok is joining X and Meta in adding a community notes feature to its platform, but it’s not eliminating professional fact-checkers.
The company said on Wednesday that the new feature, called Footnotes, aims to add more context to videos on the platform. It will first be trialed in the US and will be used for short-form videos.
“The more footnotes get written and rated on different topics, the smarter and more effective the system becomes,” Adam Presser, the head of operations at TikTok’s trust and safety department, wrote in a company blog post.
Presser wrote that users over 18 who have spent at least six months on the platform and have no recent history of violating TikTok’s community guidelines will be allowed to contribute.
The blog post said that TikTok will continue to work with 20 International Fact-Checking Network-accredited organizations to judge the accuracy of content on its platform.
Fact-checking on large social media platforms is seen as a way to curb the spread of fake news and disinformation that can harm people or entire social groups.
TikTok’s parent company faces a summer deadline to divest its US operations. President Donald Trump has twice pushed back the deadline. As its fate hangs in limbo, the company has been on a mission to convince the US public and lawmakers that content on its platform and how user data is handled does not pose a national security or social threat to the country.
In 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified in Congress. He acknowledged some shortfalls in TikTok’s data protection strategy and explained how the company was separating data generated by 150 million US users from Chinese oversight. In 2022, TikTok created an organization to secure US data.
Different approach from other platforms
Meanwhile, Meta and X have replaced professional content moderators with user-led flagging.
Meta made the change in January, starting in the US. The company said the hands-off approach was “less prone to bias.”
Meta’s move worried some advertisers who told BI they felt uncomfortable being linked to a platform that was deprioritizing brand safety and responsibility.
Democrats criticized the decision, too. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Zuckerberg was “kissing Trump’s ass” in making the change.
“Mark Zuckerberg is trying to follow in Elon’s footsteps, which means that actually, they’re going to use this guise of free speech to actually suppress critics of Trump and critics of themselves,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Since 2016, Meta has been the subject of a string of controversies over lapses in content moderation. It has also been criticized for, among other issues, its role in illicit drug sales. Last year, founder Mark Zuckerberg joined tech CEOs for a congressional grilling about safety measures for children online.
Internationally, Meta’s lack of content moderation and reliance on third-party civil society groups to report misinformation have been found to play a role in proliferating violence in Myanmar, Iraq, and Ethiopia.
The company says it removes millions of posts a day that violate its policies.
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