Meta has launched the next phase of its Community Notes roll-out, with an expanded test of the crowdsourced fact-checking program beginning in select countries in Latin America.
Meta updated the availability info on the Community Notes explainer page earlier this week, sharing this description: “Currently, Community Notes is open to contributors based in the United States. We are also beginning to test Community Notes in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. People in these countries can sign up to be contributors. When we’re confident the product is working well and can be successful, we will look at fully launching in these countries — beginning to publish Community Notes and transitioning away from our third-party fact checking program.”
Previously, this description only referred to the U.S., but Meta has now officially confirmed the expansion of notes to these nations.
Meta launched Community Notes in the U.S. in January 2025. The controversial move saw the company shifting into alignment with X by taking a more hands-off role in content moderation. The main impetus of Community Notes is that it empowers users to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not, lessening the onus for such on the platform itself, while also reducing the ability of external moderation groups to influence what’s allowed in its apps.
Meta claims this has been working. In May 2025, the company reported that since the launch of Community Notes in the U.S., enforcement mistakes were reduced by 50%, which Meta said was a signal that the change was functioning well.
But then again, fewer mistakes in enforcement could also reflect less enforcement overall.
A key concern with Community Notes is that notes are not displayed publicly unless there is cross-political consensus. That means contributors from opposing political viewpoints need to agree that a post requires a note before that note can be shown.
For some of the more divisive political issues, that agreement will never be reached. This means that many Community Notes may never be shown on posts, even if the posts are sharing misinformation. Indeed, previous research has indicated that the vast majority of Community Notes are never displayed to users. Furthermore, many non-displayed Community Notes highlight valid concerns.
If a Community Note is not displayed, then no complaint is lodged about it being wrong. That means Meta’s reduction in enforcement mistakes could be misleading as a measure of accuracy and value.
Nevertheless, Meta is pushing ahead with the Community Notes model and simultaneously scaling back its partnerships with third-party fact-checkers across multiple countries.
This is an aspect that Meta’s Oversight Board highlighted on Thursday as a potential concern, particularly regarding this expansion:
As per the Oversight Board: “In our policy advisory opinion regarding community notes issued earlier this year, we noted the ways that community notes can add information to important debates and boost free expression, but we cautioned that in certain circumstances, including in repressive human rights regimes, contexts where there is complex division and disagreement that drives political violence, countries with large-scale disinformation networks, high-risk electoral contexts and ongoing crisis and conflict situations, community notes could contribute to real-world harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy. These factors certainly exist in some of the countries Meta says it intends to test.”
The Oversight Board called on Meta to provide an overview of nation-specific risk factors before expanding the rollout of Community Notes. However, it seems that Meta has not yet done this.
