MENLO PARK, CA: Meta has said that it will begin testing a Community Notes feature on Facebook, Instagram and Threads this week. 

Following the tech giant’s decision to discontinue its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. this year, an X-style Community Notes feature was posed as an alternative.

According to a blog post from Meta, the approach will allow contributors on its platforms to write and rate notes on content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. 

Meta said that Community Notes will be less biased than the third-party fact-checking program as it “allows more people with more perspectives to add context to posts.”

About 200,000 potential contributors have signed up across the three apps to take part in the program, with the wait list still open for those wishing to join. 

Initially, notes will not appear on the content, with testing beginning by “gradually and randomly admitting people off of the wait list” and time being taken “to test the writing and rating system before any notes are published publicly.”

Meta said it will broadly follow the same approach to Community Notes as X, and it won’t decide which posts get rated or written, leaving this decision to contributors. 

To safeguard against bias, notes will not be published unless contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them. Further, Community Notes will have a limit of 500 characters and will need to include a link to support the note.

Nicola Mendelsohn, head of the global business group at Meta, said in a LinkedIn post, “We believe empowering more people to join the contributors community is a better approach, and one that will be less biased and more scalable.”

“As we do with most new product rollouts, we’ll initially be focusing on organic content,” she said. “That means right now advertisements are not eligible to have a Community Note added to them.”

This story first appeared on Performance Marketing World.