Meta officials reveal hopes to bring widely criticised moderation tool ‘Community Notes’ to AustraliaCaitlyn RintoulThe NightlyMon, 16 February 2026 9:13AMCommentsCommentsEmail Caitlyn Rintoul
Officials at Mark Zuckerburg’s Meta have revealed the tech giant hopes to bring a widely criticised moderation tool “Community Notes” to Australia soon if it’s successful in United States trials.
Senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah was scathing in her assessment of the idea suggested by Meta policy experts Simon Milner and Cheryl Seeto before an Australian misinformation inquiry in Canberra on Monday.
The Victorian Senator raised concerns about the reliability of the crowd-sourced model compared to well-established fact checkers and urged Meta not to push corporate responsibility over moderating content onto “ill-equipped” users.
“We had a lot of criticism of ‘Community Notes’ by experts in Australia, who suggested that this is pushing the onus of corporate responsibility on to the public when they are ill-equipped to deal with a behemoth like Meta and other social media platforms,” she said.
“As a committee, I don’t think we would be terribly in favour of putting this onto the Australian public.”
The open-source moderation feature was developed and introduced on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, in 2022 and is marketed as a tool which will empower people to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts.
However, it’s been flanked by criticism that it replaces expert moderation with a “biased” or slow crowd-sourced approach.
Mr Milner told the parliamentary hearing that while Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta currently contracted expert services — like Australian Associated Press (AAP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) — Community Notes was easier to scale.
“One of the issues with fact checking it that it’s hard to scale and that’s one of the reasons why we are looking at ‘Community Notes’ as an alternative because it is more straightforward to scale that than fact checkers.
“Because fact checkers have to be authorised by the international fact checking network, there are limits their ability to do that, and so we are looking at alternative ways of doing this at scale.”
During the questioning, Senator Ananda-Rajah also raised concern at a sharp drop off in the amount of content being removed by Meta, insisting that it had “literally fallen off a cliff” since 2022.
According to data provided to the committee, 91,000 pieces of content were removed in 2022, which was reduced to 9700 posts removals in 2023 and 350 posts in 2024.
Mr Milner insisted Meta said it had blocked almost 700 million fake accounts globally in the third quarter of 2025.
But officials also couldn’t answer a string of questions about bots on their platforms, how long their fact checking contract was with AAP and why their fake article and why account figures tailed off after 2022.
“This brings me to all the statistics you rattled off at the beginning,” Senator Ananda-Rajah said.
“You know when you were saying that, I was thinking of one thing only and that’s ‘there’s lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics’.
“These numbers sound impressive, 700 million accounts globally. I think what is relevant with your numbers is actually the denominator.”
Mr Milner responded by claiming that Meta was “acting at a normal scale on attempts to create fake accounts” on its services.
“And we’re being successful in doing that,” he said.
Senator Ananda-Rajah disputed his claims by citing a report by Australian research organisation Reset Tech Australia.
“I put it to you that you are actually doing a fraction of what you are capable of doing,” she said.
“They identified nearly four million accounts, but you are only removing a fraction of these accounts. You’re not getting down to actually removing the entire network.”
Mr Milner responded to discredit the report: “Our assessment is, their report is wrong. It’s factually wrong”.
It comes as Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been forced to comply with Australia’s social media, which requires ten social media platforms to age-verify users and block under 16s from their sites.
Executives from fellow tech giant Tik Tok are expected to appear before the same inquiry in Canberra on Monday afternoon.
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