Community Notes PAO
UPDATED NOV 19, 2025
Policy Advisory Opinion 2025-01
On November 19, 2025, the Oversight Board accepted Meta’s request for a Policy Advisory Opinion (PAO) on our approach to expanding the Community Notes program outside of the United States.
Community Notes is a new product that allows users to add more context to public, organic content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. However, our approach to enforcing our Misinformation Community Standard remains unchanged. Under this policy, we remove misinformation where it is likely to directly contribute to the “risk of imminent physical harm” and “interference with the functioning of political processes.” We also continue to use trusted third parties to help identify content violating that policy.
Meta has requested the Oversight Board’s guidance on the country-level factors we should consider when deciding whether any country should be omitted from our Community Notes expansion as well as how to weigh those factors in relation to one another in a way that can be applied on a large scale. We’ve made this request in order to work towards establishing fundamental guiding principles for these decisions as we consider a global rollout.
As a part of our request, we presented an illustrative list of possible guiding factors to consider, including:
- Low levels of freedom of expression
- The absence of freedom of the press
- Government restrictions on the internet
- Low levels of digital literacy
- The ability, currently and in the past, to achieve disagreement required for consensus [in the Community Notes algorithm]
This list is non-exhaustive and not intended to constrain the Board from considering other factors which may be relevant.
We appreciate the Board’s independent expertise and thoughtful consideration of the issues presented in this PAO request, which will be helpful to our program’s international expansion.
Once the Board has finished deliberating, we will consider and publicly respond to its recommendations within 60 days, and will update this post accordingly. Please see the Board’s website for the recommendations when they issue them.