- EFCSN welcomes Meta’s Oversight Board policy advisory opinion that community notes are inadequate as a standalone solution for addressing harmful misinformation, warning that the program’s design limits its ability to address misinformation linked to real-world harm.
- The Oversight Board has called on Meta to maintain relationships with independent fact-checkers, especially ahead of elections, conflicts, and rollouts in linguistically complex markets, and to adopt a hybrid model rather than replace professional expertise with crowdsourced tools.
- The EFCSN urges Meta to heed their Oversight Board’s warnings and adopt a hybrid model that prioritises factual accuracy and human rights. Crowdsourced experiments should complement professional expertise rather than replace it.
BRUSSELS, March 26, 2026 — The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) welcomes Meta’s Oversight Board’s Opinion regarding the global expansion of “community notes.”
While the Board identifies critical human rights risks, one finding stands out: community notes are inadequate as a standalone solution for addressing harmful misinformation. This key finding by the independent group of experts critically illustrates how if Meta ends its Third-Party Fact-Checking Program and expands X’s model of community notes beyond the United States, it would affect the platform’s ability to protect users from harmful misinformation.
The Oversight Board’s findings point to fundamental design flaws that cast serious doubt on community notes as a primary tool for harm mitigation — even at this early stage of global rollout.
As noted in the Meta’s Oversight Board’s own executive summary:
“Insofar as Meta envisions community notes as its primary way to address misinformation… the Board finds that the program’s design may limit its ability to accomplish that goal. Delays in note publication, the limited number of published notes and its dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm”.
Evidence of Systemic Failure
Research cited by Meta’s Oversight Board shows the community notes model cannot match professional fact-checking across three key dimensions:
- Scale: The Oversight Board identifies the “limited number of published notes” as a design flaw that raises “serious doubts” about community notes effectiveness. Meta reported that 900 community notes became visible in the first six months of its U.S. rollout. Over a similar period in the EU, professional fact-checkers enabled Meta to apply labels to approximately 35 million Facebook posts.
- Visibility: Across platforms using this model, fewer than 10% of proposed notes ever reach the public, often failing to address the highly polarized topics where intervention is most needed.
- Speed: Meta’s Oversight Board flags publication delays as a serious concern, and independent analysis of comparable crowdsourced models supports this: notes take an average of over 65.7 hours to appear, well after misleading content has reached peak visibility.
Meta’s Oversight Board’s Conclusion
The Oversight Board is clear that community notes alone cannot fulfil content moderation requirements for harmful disinformation. The Board has explicitly called on Meta to maintain relationships with independent fact-checkers, particularly in high-risk contexts such as elections, conflicts, and linguistically complex markets, and to delay any rollout until it can confirm the technical and operational capacity to handle that complexity effectively.
While platforms publicly “recognized that disinformation is a big systemic risk,” effective mitigation requires prioritising factual accuracy over user consensus. Fact-checking is about adding useful context to users as they see misinformation. It is a fundamental expression of freedom of speech that provides citizens with the verified facts they need to reach their own informed conclusions. Meta has reported that 95% of users choose not to click through once an independent fact-checker partner applies a warning label, and these interventions even encourage users to voluntarily delete false content. Community notes alone does not qualify as a risk mitigation measure benchmarking the Third Party Fact-Checking Program under the DSA in the eyes of the EFCSN.
The EFCSN urges Meta to heed their Oversight Board’s warnings and adopt a hybrid model that prioritises factual accuracy and human rights. As the Board concluded, Meta must maintain relationships with local, independent fact-checkers to ensure claims are evaluated accurately across different languages in every market. Crowdsourced experiments should complement professional expertise rather than replace it.
The European Fact-Checking Standards Network is an association of fact-checking organizations who commit to the standards of independence, transparency, and journalistic quality outlined in the European Code of Standards for Independent Fact-Checking Organisations. With over 60 verified members across Europe, the EFCSN is the voice of European fact-checkers.
