TikTok is the latest tech platform to add its own Community Notes-style feature as of Wednesday morning, with the popular video app introducing “Footnotes.”
The feature is similar to the one first introduced by X and later copied by Meta earlier this year, allowing users to add context to videos and point out when content is misleading or false.
“Footnotes will draw on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content on our platform,” Adam Presser, TikTok’s head of trust and safety, said in a blog post.
He continued, “It will add to our suite of measures that help people understand the reliability of content and access authoritative sources, including our content labels, search banners, our fact-checking program, and more.”
Footnotes will first rollout in the U.S. before expanding to other markets. TikTok users can apply to be a “Footnotes contributor,” but they have to:
- Have been on TikTok for at least six months
- Be at least 18 years old
- Have no recent history of violating TikTok’s Community Guidelines
Presser said Footnotes will use a “bridge-based ranking system” created to find “agreement between people who usually have different opinions.” He said the system is inspired by the open-sourced system of X and other platforms.
“It works by allowing contributors with differing opinions to leave and vote on the helpfulness of a footnote,” he added. “Only footnotes that meet the threshold for ‘helpful’ will be visible to the community, at which point the broader community can vote on it, too.”
TikTok’s new features comes after X, then still known as Twitter, teased Community Notes under the name “Birdwatch” in 2021; the app then launched Community Notes after Musk bought Twitter in late 2022.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook and Instagram would scrap their third-party fact-checking operations in favor of its own Community Notes feature.
He said that, while Meta tried its best to accurately police content since it first introduced fact-checking in late 2016, there had been too many errors. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said. He then went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and compared its fact-checking operation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.” Facebook and Instagram’s version of Community Notes launched in March.
TikTok’s new feature for its 170 million monthly U.S. users also comes as its future in America remains in limbo. The app received yet another extension on its ban from the States from President Trump in June, giving ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent company, until mid-September to sell its U.S. operation.
