Meta says Community Notes is bigger than fact-checking. That's not the whole story

Meta said yesterday that it will expand Community Notes, its crowdsourced fact-checking program, to sixteen Latin American countries. As part of the announcement, the company touted the fact that in the US pilot “the daily volume of Community Notes has doubled independent fact-checks.”

It may be true that more corrective information is being added to posts in the US through Community Notes than through the fact-checking partnership Meta has wound down. But the target of such corrections is very different from before.

An Indicator analysis found that just 3.0% of Instagram posts fact-checked by AFP’s US bureau since April 2025 have a corrective note. This is much lower than the 20.5% rate for X’s Community Notes program.

Instagram posts that have gone without a note despite AFP publishing a fact check about them include false claims about children’s vaccines, the health benefits of nicotine pouches, and voter fraud in the NYC mayoral election.¹

The low prevalence of Community Notes on debunked Instagram posts suggests – at a minimum – that Meta users aren’t focusing on providing context to the same claims that professional fact-checkers cover. While their overall coverage may be broader, they are not a replacement for the fact-checking partnership axed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a sop to the Trump administration. 

A Meta spokesperson told Indicator that it labels twice as many posts with Community Notes on a given day as under the now defunct US fact-checking program. They also said that Meta’s program is relatively new compared to X’s Community Notes and will need time to establish itself.

Angie Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), told Indicator that she worries the program “can't actually prioritize accurate information — that it has the outward appearance of correcting falsehoods while the claims that matter most, especially the polarizing ones, go unnoted.”