TikTok is getting its own version of community notes
- TikTok has announced “Footnotes,” its own version of community notes, which allows users to contribute to moderation and add relevant information to content on the platform.
- US users can apply to become Footnotes contributors starting today, as long as they meet TikTok’s requirements, including being 18 or older and not violating community guidelines in the past six months.
- The feature uses a bridge-based ranking system that allows contributors with differing opinions to leave and vote on the helpfulness of a footnote, with only footnotes meeting the threshold for helpfulness visible to the community.
- TikTok plans to test Footnotes in the US for short-form videos and will open access to contributors over the coming months, with the goal of making the system smarter and more effective through user feedback.
- Footnotes is part of TikTok’s efforts to augment its platform integrity measures and features, following a reported layoff of trust and safety staff in February, as the company shifts towards crowd-sourced moderation.
TikTok has announced “Footnotes,” its own take on the community notes features that started on Twitter and have been spreading to other social networks. As elsewhere, it’s a crowd-sourced approach to moderation — TikTok says contributors will be able to “add relevant information to content on our platform.”
US users can apply to become Footnotes contributors starting today, as long as they meet TikTok’s requirements, including that they must have been on TikTok for more than six months, must be 18 or older, and can’t have violated any community guidelines in the previous six months. The company says it will also notify US users who already fit its requirements.
Here’s how TikTok describes the process for publishing Footnotes:
Footnotes will use a bridge-based ranking system designed to find agreement between people who usually have different opinions, inspired by the open-sourced system that other platforms use. It works by allowing contributors with differing opinions to leave and vote on the helpfulness of a footnote. 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. The more footnotes get written and rated on different topics, the smarter and more effective the system becomes.
TikTok says the feature will be “tested in the U.S. for short form videos” and that it will open access to contributors “over the coming months.”
After debuting on Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, a fact-checking program reacting to online misinformation, crowd sourcing context has become a popular alternative to platform-led moderation, having spread to YouTube and Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in recent months. TikTok reportedly laid off an unknown number of its trust and safety staff in February, but today says this feature “augments our existing suite of platform integrity measures and features.”