On March 26, Meta’s Oversight Board issued a landmark advisory opinion assessing the potential human rights impacts of expanding the “community notes” program on the company’s platforms outside of the United States. The Board found that while community notes may enhance users’ freedom of expression and improve online discourse, a global “one-size-fits-all” approach could pose real-world harms in crisis and conflict zones, repressive regimes, and electoral contexts.
Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—platforms which are recognized as increasingly important in shaping public opinion and influencing elections. Statistics from 2025 show that 3.43 billion people use at least one of Meta’s products daily. The company’s attempts to counter false or misleading information on its platforms has been the subject of widespread criticism from academic experts and civil society.
At present, Meta’s approach to counter misinformation consists of three strategies: (1) remove (removing certain categories of harmful misinformation); (2) reduce (limiting the distribution of content rated as false, altered, or partly false by third-party fact-checkers); and (3) inform (providing additional information or context, typically through labels applied to content that may be misleading or confusing, while continuing to distribute the content). Community notes fall within this third category. In simple terms, community notes are a form of crowdsourced content moderation in which users can choose to write brief assessments of potentially misleading or inaccurate tweets, posts, or videos. They can also rate other users’ assessments.
If a note receives a sufficient rating (i.e. a diverse group of users rate it as “helpful”), then it becomes publicly visible. Notes appear directly beneath the original post and as such provide added context for all users of the platform. There is no review for the accuracy of the content of a community note, nor is there any enforcement mechanism; that is, if the consensus from a community note is that a particular post is misleading or inaccurate, the platform will not take action to moderate the post or the individuals who spread the misinformation.
The role of the strategy to “reduce” misinformation via fact-checking is now minimal due to Meta’s January 2025 decision to end its third-party fact-checking program and move to a community notes model. In announcing this shift, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan emphasised the importance of free speech:
Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.
This “crowd sourcing” approach to content moderation is currently utilized on X (formerly Twitter). The problem is that it relies on the community’s ability to be able to distinguish between “truth” and misinformation and may not be seen as legitimate by the public as professional fact checking. For example, The Hill’s opinion survey on discontinuing fact-checking in the United States, which surveyed nearly 1,000 respondents, found that a clear majority (83 percent)—including a majority of Republicans (63 percent)—supported attaching warning labels stating “false information” to posts identified as such by independent fact-checkers, together with links to sources containing verifiably correct information.
This article argues that the Board’s advisory opinion on community notes is significant not only in shaping Meta’s efforts to tackle misinformation, but also in demonstrating that the Oversight Board can, to a meaningful extent, serve as a check on unbridled platform power through a private adjudicatory process. By advising on and recommending possible ways in which community notes might be rolled out, the Board has contributed to the protection of human rights in the digital age.
Meta’s Request and Public Participation in the Advisory Opinion
In November 2025, Meta requested the Oversight Board to provide a policy advisory opinion on the factors Meta should consider when deciding which countries, if any, to omit when expanding the community notes framework outside of the United States. Meta raised this question in light of relatively wide global digital divide, limited freedom of the press in certain contexts, or concerns regarding levels of digital literacy. It also requested guidance on how to “weigh those factors against one another in a scalable manner.”
Given the complex differences in the potential utility (and limitations) of community notes across geographical regions, an important question to ask before analyzing the content of the opinion is whether the development of the opinion was itself a participatory process that sufficiently accounted for geographic diversity.
As provided in Section 4 of its founding Charter and Article 2.1.4 of its Bylaws, the Oversight Board may issue an advisory opinion in response to a request from Meta for policy guidance. In so doing, the Board invites input from experts and the public, as clearly set out in its Rulebook for Case Reviews and Policy Guidance. Accordingly, the Rulebook sets out the modalities of public participation in two key ways: (a) the collation of public comments and research findings; and (b) stakeholder input.
In this advisory opinion, the Board first sought to ensure a participatory process by inviting direct public comments. In December 2025, the Board received 23 submissions from individuals, civil society organizations, academics, and news and fact-checking organizations that met the criteria for this policy advisory opinion. Of these, eight originated from the United States and Canada; five from Asia Pacific and Oceania; five from Europe; three from Latin America and the Caribbean; and two from the Middle East and North Africa. In this respect, the Board appears to have cast a wide net, bringing a diverse range of regional perspectives to the table.
Second, the Board facilitated participation via stakeholder consultations to examine the opportunities and risks associated with community notes, engaging approximately 30 participants—including researchers, fact-checkers, technical experts, and civil society advocates—from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. By doing so, the Board not only brought diverse voices into the process, but also ensured that its deliberations remained genuinely participatory.
What the Advisory Opinion Says
As a starting point, it is important to highlight what the Oversight Board did not say. That is, the Board did not make any recommendation about the legitimacy or wisdom of extending community notes outside the United States as a policy. The Board explicitly states that it “neither endorses nor opposes this approach.” Rather, it assumes that Meta will “make community notes available everywhere” and “addresses what considerations should preclude or condition launching the product in a particular country.”
However, the Board did find as an overall matter that community notes are inadequate as a standalone solution for addressing harmful misinformation. It specifically emphasizes the limits of community notes alone to to counter misinformation:
Insofar as Meta envisions community notes as its primary way to address misinformation… the Board finds that the program’s design may limit its ability to accomplish that goal. Delays in note publication, the limited number of published notes and its dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm.
It outlines the considerations that should preclude or condition launching the product in a particular country. Key concerns include the need for safeguards in repressive human rights contexts and the exercise of caution during elections in particular. The Board recommended that Meta:
- Initially omit countries with a history of coordinated disinformation networks;
- Not introduce community notes during crises or protracted armed conflict conditions;
- Delay introducing notes where there is language complexity that Meta cannot technically and operationally accommodate;
- Exercise extreme caution where social division and disagreement that drives political violence cannot be simply clarified; and
- Omit countries facing persistent obstacles to Internet access.
While it is too early to fully appreciate the implications of the advisory opinion, it appears to have been endorsed by some fact-checking organisations and tech policy commentators. For instance, the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) welcomed the Opinion and urged Meta to “heed their Oversight Board’s warnings and adopt a hybrid model that prioritises factual accuracy and human rights.”
Ramsha Jahangir, Senior Editor at Tech Policy Press, has noted that the Opinion “makes clear that the path to ‘worldwide’ deployment is considerably more complicated than the company may have anticipated.” She points out:
The advisory opinion highlights one of Community Notes’ apparent blind spots. A country may have a prominent liberal-conservative axis, but contributors might rate posts based on unrelated factors, such as support for a political party, memes, or a popular soccer player. The algorithm then interprets whichever axis explains ratings best, which may have little to do with actual political divisions.
We acknowledge that others may disagree with the decision. For instance, free expression advocates may see fact-checking as paternalistic or prone to introducing subjectivity or even bias into content moderation. Others may argue that crowd-sourced moderation is more democratic—that is, representative of the community—than expert models such as formal fact-checking systems. However, as noted above, the advisory opinion did not find that community notes should be banned. It simply set out factors to be considered in their use.
Implications for Human Rights Protection in the Digital Age
There is little doubt that the Oversight Board has begun to emerge as an informal but influential global human rights adjudicator in matters of online freedom of expression since its inception in 2020. As Professors Laurence Helfer and Molly Land have argued, the Board has the potential to serve as an important check on Meta and to significantly advance the promotion and protection of rights online.
The rollout of community notes could have both direct and indirect impacts on human rights in at least four distinct ways, with implications for the role of the Board in advising Meta on the program. First, the use of community notes in a democratic society would likely promote freedom of expression as provided under Article 19 of the ICCPR. As elaborated in the advisory opinion, this right may be enhanced insofar as community notes serve as a vehicle through which contributors can access additional tools for direct expression, foster counter-speech, and generate as well as disseminate contextual information that might otherwise remain unavailable to users (see p. 21). Nonetheless, the Board found that introducing community notes in certain countries outside of the United States may, in certain circumstances, pose significant human rights risks and generate—or contribute to—tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy under principle 13 of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), including respecting the freedom of expression (principle 11) and conducting human rights due diligence by assessing potential and actual impacts (principle 17).
Second, the community notes system may place individuals at risk of retaliation if anonymity is compromised in contexts where governments suppress dissent both offline and online. As the Board notes, such risks may implicate a range of civil and political rights, including contributors’ rights to privacy under Article 17 of the ICCPR, to security of the person (Article 9, ICCPR), and, in extreme cases, even the right to life (Article 6, ICCPR).
Third, it may also pose risks to the right to participate in public affairs under Article 25 of the ICCPR, insofar as the community notes system could be exploited by coordinated disinformation networks via brigade ratings, striping context, and drowning out opponents’ posts so that misleading narratives appear more credible—particularly in contexts marked by past or ongoing large-scale manipulation of, or attacks on, information ecosystems. Prior to this advisory opinion, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights expressed concern in a March 2025 resolution that “community notes are susceptible to be captured by forces that do not respect human rights.” Similar concerns have been raised by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, who in a September 2025 report underscored the system’s “susceptibility to capture” through the manipulation of ratings and agenda-setting, as well as its “inconsistent application of standards” and “lack of consistent expertise and requirements of community consensus.” These fallibilities could lead to situations in which meaningful participation and public discourse are suppressed, which in turn could silence important voices precisely when they most need to be heard (see General Comment No. 25, ¶ 8).
Another impact concerns the indirect implications for the rights to equality and non-discrimination (see Articles 26 and 2, ICCPR). Community notes may risk privileging dominant political, ethnic, or linguistic groups, while marginalising disfavoured minorities—particularly where multiple groups share prejudices against a minority. As the Board makes clear, this problem is exacerbated when such groups are unrepresented or underrepresented among contributors, potentially leading the community notes algorithm to model patterns of agreement and disagreement that fail to reflect critical societal divisions.
Conclusion
We believe that community notes place a considerable burden on the public to regulate social media. This is because they require ordinary users to devote time, expertise, and labor to evaluating misleading content at scale, often in polarized environments marked by conflict, disinformation campaigns, linguistic inequalities, or fear of retaliation. As such, their effectiveness and legitimacy must be assessed in light of the geopolitical contexts in which they operate. We therefore agree with the cautions and recommendations set out in the Oversight Board’s advisory opinion.
Meta Oversight Board Co-Chair Paolo Carozza praised the opinion as a model for the wider industry, emphasising that “the lessons that we lay out in this policy advisory opinion are certain to be relevant to a variety of other social media platforms as well.” However, while a very important decision, the advisory opinion’s non-binding nature means that Meta is not obligated to implement the recommendations.
Given a current geopolitical environment marked by systematic human rights violations globally and a broader destabilization of the international order, there is a real risk that Meta may evade meaningful accountability, including checks by the Oversight Board. In such circumstances, the impact of this advisory opinion may prove modest at best, if not altogether disregarded. Further, and in an unfortunate development for the upholding of human and digital rights and other fundamental considerations, there are reports that Meta has recently contemplated defunding the Oversight Board by 2028 as it shifts more of its trust and safety functions from human oversight to AI and automated systems. Be that as it may, Meta exercises considerable power and influence across the world. Without oversight, there are real concerns that this power may become unbridled and arbitrary.
