Meta Open Registration For Contributors Community Notes, Who Wants To Register?

Meta's Community Notes are expected to launch in the next few months (photo: x @MetaNewsroom)

JAKARTA - Meta's Community Notes are expected to roll out in the next few months, after the social network announced it would end its third-party fact-checking program because "the facts are outdated." Now, users can sign up to be contributors to this feature on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Meanwhile, owner X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, appears to be threatening Community Notes neutrality on its platform by announcing plans to "improve" the feature.

In the past, when people still care whether a claim is right or wrong, social networks employed professional researchers tasked with verifying claims on their platform to prevent the spread of misinformation.

After Musk bought X, he deleted the team and replaced it with Community Notes, where user X could add corrections and context to the tweet. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that his social network would adopt a similar approach.

In a statement, Zuckerberg said:

"Kami akan mengakhiri program pemeriksaan fakta pihak ketiga di Amerika Serikat dan beralih ke program Community Notes. Kami telah melihat pendekatan ini berhasil di X – di mana komunitas mereka memutuskan kapan postingan berpotensi menyesatkan dan membutuhkan konteks tambahan, serta orang-orang dari berbagai perspektif memutuskan konteks apa yang bermanfaat bagi pengguna lain. Kami pikir ini bisa menjadi cara yang lebih baik untuk mencapai tujuan awal kami, yaitu memberikan informasi kepada pengguna tentang apa yang mereka lihat – dan cara yang kurang rentan terhadap bias."

"We will end the third-party fact-checking program in the United States and switch to the Community Notes program. We have seen this approach succeed in X where their community decides when posts have the potential to be misleading and require additional contexts, as well as people from various perspectives decide what contexts are beneficial for other users. We think this could be a better way to achieve our original goal, namely providing users with information about what they see and less vulnerable to bias."

You can register to join this program here.

Elon Musk doesn't seem happy with the fact that many of his own tweets have been noted by the community, as well as other user tweets that he retweeted. In particular, he dislikes the corrections given by user X to Donald Trump's claim about the ranking of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's approval.

Musk made false claims that Zelensky controlled the poll, and mistakenly stated that Ukraine's president refused to hold elections during the war even though the country's law banned him, because it was impossible to hold a fair election in a state of war.

Even Musk's AI Grok managed to correct it:

"Klaim bahwa Zelensky 'menahan pemilu' sebagai tindakan diktator tidak berdasar. Penundaan pemilu, yang seharusnya diadakan pada Maret 2024, berasal dari konstitusi Ukraina dan 'Undang-Undang Hukum Darurat' (No. 389-VIII), yang melarang pemilu selama keadaan darurat – yang saat ini diberlakukan karena invasi Rusia sejak Februari 2022. Keputusan ini bukan pilihan sepihak Zelensky, tetapi membutuhkan persetujuan parlemen, yang diperbarui setiap 90 hari."

"The claim that Zelensky 'detains elections' as an act of a baseless dictator. The postponement of elections, which should have been held in March 2024, comes from the Ukrainian constitution and the 'Emergency Law' (No. 389-VIII), which prohibits elections during a state of emergency currently enforced due to the Russian invasion since February 2022. This decision is not Zelensky's one-sided choice, but requires parliamentary approval, which is updated every 90 days."

However, Musk said he would "improve" fact-checking.

In a tweet, Musk wrote:

"Sayangnya, @CommunityNotes semakin sering dimanipulasi oleh pemerintah dan media lama. Sedang berusaha memperbaikinya..."

"Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being manipulated by the government and the old media. Trying to fix it..."

This tweet follows his comments a few months earlier, in which he described the Community Notes as "extraordinary."