I reviewed 100 of TikTok’s “Footnotes” so you don’t have to

Last Thursday, TikTok announced that it was rolling out its crowdsourced moderation feature, Footnotes, to all users in the United States.

The launch comes after a three month testing period that evidently gave the company confidence to scale the program. Yet a review of 100 proposed footnotes left me skeptical that the feature is going to be a runaway success.

Footnotes works much in the same way as the Community Notes program on X and Meta. Users can propose a short comment and a link to be added to a video posted by someone else; the “footnote” will be attached to the original video if enough people with a diverse set of previously-expressed opinions rate it helpful.

If you’re in the US, you can add a footnote by long-clicking on a video and selecting the “add footnote” option. 

For example, I added a footnote to this video that falsely claimed actor George Lopez is dying and handing out money (it’s part of a scam operation I wrote about in July). As you can see below, the Footnotes program is intended to combat misinformation by flagging false claims, adding missing context, or calling out deceptively edited media. 

To access footnotes proposed by other users you have to search for “Footnotes” and hit the “Get started” button. That leads you to a feed similar to the For You Page, except all videos have a proposed note at the bottom with an option to rate it as “Helpful” or “Not helpful.” 

There doesn’t appear to be a feed of footnotes deemed helpful, which both X and Meta have. This is a strange choice by TikTok and suggests the company may not be confident in the quality or quantity of its scoring algorithm. (I asked the company about this on Sunday and have not heard back.) 

Given what I saw in my review of 100 proposed footnotes, I understand their caution.