TikTok is going to be testing a new crowd-sourced fact-checking system called Footnotes. It’s seems similar to the Community Notes systems already in use on other social media, such as X and Facebook.

TikTok is also keeping its current fact-checking systems in place. The way these community systems generally work is, say someone makes a post stating "whales are the biggest fish out there." Another user could add a note saying "actually, whales are mammals, and here's a source with more information."

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Vanderbilt psychology professor Lisa Fazio about why this model of "citizen fact-checking" is catching on.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Lisa Fazio: X developed this Community Note system that we're now seeing spread to other communities, and it has a lot of positives. Members of the community can catch misinformation that might go unnoticed by the platform itself, and we know that community members often do have relevant knowledge that helps to provide context extra information. But I think platforms are also turning to this because it takes heat off of themselves. When they put up a fact check, when they make decisions around content, they have to stand by those decisions. They sometimes get heat for it. When it's something that the community has done themselves, it allows them to put some distance between the platform and the decision.

Stephanie Hughes: Unlike Meta, TikTok is actually keeping its partnerships with professional fact-checkers. How do you think this combination of amateur and pro fact-checkers will work?

Fazio: In a good system, the kind of amateurs are able to use what the professionals find to kind of quickly produce these kind of community notes. So I think in a functional information ecosystem, the two can work hand in hand pretty well, but you definitely need some professionals around who can do the type of deep verification that you need for tricky topics.

Hughes: What do we know about how effective these kinds of systems are in tamping down misinformation and surfacing the good stuff?

Fazio: So if all you're doing is adding the community note and not changing anything about how the post is distributed or kind of how much it gets up ranked in the algorithm, then it's going to depend on how visible that content is. One of the things I'm really worried about for Footnotes is it's literally a footnote. How often do you actually pay attention to the footnotes and things that you're reading, especially on TikTok, which is such a visual platform? Are people really going to go down into the comments or see or notice this additional context?

Hughes: What do you think this new system could mean for how we all experience TikTok?

Fazio: Frankly, I don't think it's going to have much of an impact. I don't expect them to be all that visible, and it'll take a while before you can get this community up and running. We'll see. I do think Community Notes on X have ended up being useful. They do kind of provide some additional context for posts and additional information. But again, that's a visual, text-based medium where adding that community note at the bottom is really visible, really stands out, and people are likely to see and read it. [It's] unclear if that will happen on TikTok.

Hughes: On the Community Note systems on X and Meta, notes only appear if they're rated as helpful by people with different viewpoints. What do you think that means for what actually shows up, the notes that actually show up on the platforms?

Fazio: Yeah, it's this interesting system that has some pluses, but also definitely some problems, and that is that some misinformation is disputed between political parties, and it means that political misinformation is unlikely to get flagged, because only members of one party will agree that that is misinformation. So the types of things that tend to get flagged on community notes tend to be things that aren't at all divisive and kind of don't pit different communities against each other.

Hughes: What do you see as the future for these kinds of crowd based fact-checking systems?

Fazio: I think it'll depend on how exactly they're implemented and what happens. I mean, one of the disappointing things is that we've seen research on exactly this topic - how should we design Community Notes-like systems - canceled from the federal government. I know of researchers who had [National Science Foundation] grants designed to test exactly this. How should we best design a Community Notes-type system? It means that we have to rely on the platforms themselves to have looked at and designed the best policies. And we know that platforms tend to design for profitability, not for providing the best information ecosystem. And so I worry that this might be kind of a Band-Aid over larger problems, and that companies themselves don't have the incentives to make this program as best as it can be.

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We reached out to TikTok, and the company emphasized that this feature is meant to augment work that's already taking place to boost integrity on the platform. That includes working with more than 20 different fact-checking partners and labeling content that can't be verified.

TikTok expects the Footnotes program to go live sometime before the end of the second quarter. It's currently taking applications for users who wanto to contribute.

Personally, I have to say, when I hear the word "footnotes," I inevitably think of the David Foster Wallace novel “Infinite Jest.”

I do own this book. I have not read it. And one reason I haven’t is because I've been scared off by the 100 pages or so of footnotes that come at the end.

I know - it's a book, I should just plough through it. But it's still kinda daunting. And like Lisa points out, it does make me wonder how many people are going to take the time to read through footnotes when they're scrolling online.