Community Notes – X and Meta Strive for Solution to Misinformation Without Censorship

​In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the best remedy for “falsehood and fallacies,” besides education, “is more speech, not enforced silence.”
 
Almost a century later, enforced silence became the favored solution of government censors, from the FBI to the State Department, who secretly jawboned social media platforms to remove posts the government believed to be disinformation from Russia, misinformation, or dangerous information. As Mark Zuckerberg made clear in his recent interview with Joe Rogan, when a highly regulated industry gets angry calls demanding removal of content from the government, it is not taken as a gentle suggestion. Thus for several years threads of the national discussion were quietly pulled, with millions of social media consumers none the wiser.
 
That era is now over.
 
President Trump’s executive order forbidding censorship and the shuttering of government agencies, like the State Department’s infamous Global Engagement Center, prevent a restart of the government censorship regime, at least for the foreseeable future.
 
But the complex problems of content moderation still remain. The First Amendment restricts government control of speech, but it does not forbid social media companies from moderating the content they host. Meta says it will continue the content moderation for material that is obscene, violent, and extreme. But otherwise, the way is open for controversial speech of all sorts.
 
How, then, will assertions be vetted? Not by third-party fact-checkers. That model, too, is broken. Zuckerberg agreed that the fact-checking process was subjective and often warped by partisan bias. The way forward for Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, then, is to promote more speech, by allowing the public to test ideas. Meta is doing this with the incorporation of the same open-source algorithm that powers X’s community notes. That technology is now being tested by Meta across the country, with 200,000 people already signed up to become Community Notes contributors.
 
Crowd-sourced factchecking will undoubtedly be imperfect. Social media platforms will have to be on guard for organized efforts to game the new system. But overall, Community Notes is the superior solution. It follows speech with more speech – and then leaves it up to us to decide what is fair and true, just as we do all the time at the American dinner table.

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