Community Notes PAO

UPDATED JUN 5, 2026
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.
Read the board's case selection summary
Case decision
We welcome the Oversight Board’s response today, March 26, 2026, on this policy advisory opinion (PAO) referral.
After conducting a review of the recommendations provided by the Board, we will update this post with initial responses to those recommendations within 60 days.
Recommendations
Recommendation 1 (implementing in part)
Throughout its recommendation of factors, the Board has noted where Community Notes could create or heighten the risk of harm to users. These affirmative harms have been distinguished from scenarios where the possibility of harm comes from the inadequacy of Community Notes as a harm mitigation measure, particularly in relation to deceptive information that falls short of Meta’s threshold for removal. The Board recommends that the factors where affirmative harms are more likely should be weighted more heavily, and it has indicated that these involve thresholds where Meta should not introduce Community Notes until it demonstrates it can do so in a way that ensures the risks of these harms have been mitigated. Elsewhere, the Board has recommended that Meta proceed cautiously and stagger or delay rollouts until testing demonstrates that its safeguards are adequate. This does not imply that these factors are less important. The Board notes that this guidance cannot be absolute. In its deliberations, the Board considered scenarios where the presence of one factor might predominate such that omitting a country is appropriate, as well as scenarios where no one factor is particularly severe, but several factors compound in a way that makes omission appropriate.
Ultimately, Meta’s human rights diligence and risk mitigation efforts should examine the factors recommended by the Board alongside internal platform data and external feedback on Community Notes performance. The Board notes that Meta already tracks some of the factors discussed above, as well as the rankings recommended as proxies for the factors, as part of its Integrity Country Prioritization Index. This is a biannual process that Meta uses to review and prioritize countries that have the highest risk of offline harm and violence. The Board expects that Meta will exercise the same degree of rigor and judgment in determining how the introduction of Community Notes will proceed in different countries
In the analysis above, the Board has provided Meta with a series of factors it should consider in determining whether to omit a country from any future expansion of Community Notes beyond the United States, as well as guidance as to where the gathering and analysis of additional data on the program function will be critical to assessing the future relevance and weight of those factors. To demonstrate its consideration of the Board’s recommended factors, Meta should provide the Board with the criteria or risk matrix it develops to guide expansion every six months during its period of initial expansion, along with evidence of how these are applied in country-level decisions about Community Notes’ expansion.
The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta submits its first report detailing how the outlined factors have been considered, balanced and weighted for each relevant market, and how its gathering and assessment of further data on program function will be integrated into the periodic reassessment of the appropriate weighting of the outlined factors.
Our commitment: We intend to update the Board on this program, progress, and any criteria we consider as part of our approach to initial expansion. As noted in our initial submission to the Board and as the Board affirms in their opinion, as we look at expansion beyond the United States, we’re taking the time to approach this thoughtfully. As we approach expansion internationally, we will take the time to fully consider the Board's recommended criteria to ensure we are balancing the appropriate country-level factors and weights as outlined in its Policy Advisory Opinion. We plan to engage with the Board on the format and substance of this reporting as expansion develops.
Considerations: In January 2025, we announced that we would be transitioning from our third party fact checking program in the United States, and introducing Community Notes—a way for the community to determine which content could benefit from additional context. Notes are added to posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads when contributors who typically disagree with each other agree that a note is helpful. The feature allows people to add more context to posts that are potentially misleading or confusing. Notes are separate from, and not a replacement for our content moderation. We continue to have Community Standards, which outline what is and isn't allowed on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Within our Community Standards we have a Misinformation policy. We will still remove misinformation in the very specific instances where it is likely to directly contribute to the risk of imminent physical harm. We also remove content that is likely to directly contribute to interference with the functioning of political processes. As we look at the expansion of Community Notes beyond the United States, we requested a Policy Advisory Opinion from the Oversight Board to help guide what criteria ought to be considered when deciding which, if any, countries we should exclude from expansion.
We already consider a range of factors when assessing the suitability of new product launches and market expansions, including our structured approach to maintaining online safety in at-risk countries and our elections integrity framework, as described in our updates to the case on the Video of Brazilian General's Speech. As the Board notes, Meta already tracks many of the factors it recommended through this existing prioritization work. We intend to build on these processes as we consider Community Notes expansion.
As the Board notes in their decision and analysis, the usage of Community Notes may enhance users’ freedom of expression and further allow online discourse with considerations for scale, speed, and certain safeguards. We will also assess next steps for incorporating the criteria for expansion that the Board laid out as part of any potential expansion, including considerations for when to delay rollout of Community Notes during periods of elections, for example. This criteria may include a risk matrix and framework to consider determining whether to include or omit a country for expansion and how to weigh such factors. We note the Board's guidance that potential affirmative harms should be weighted more heavily, and that expansion should not proceed in a given market until those risks have been adequately mitigated. Additionally, we recognize the guidance may not be absolute given there may be a range of considerations and factors that should inform a decision to expand in a particular country.
As this program develops, we will continue to seek out opportunities to share more details about how this program works and provide transparency around how notes are applied through our Transparency Center. We look forward to continuing to share additional details about this program and any future rollout, including through future reports on this recommendation during initial expansion to the Oversight Board.