Meta Says Community Notes Will Not Be Displayed on Paid Ads

An important note of clarification on Meta’s implementation of Community Notes: It will not display Community Notes on paid ads.

Whether they’ll be allowed to be added to paid endorsements from celebrities and influencers, however, remains to be seen.

Meta’s decision to switch to Community Notes, and get rid of third-party fact-checkers, has sparked widespread backlash, and triggered concern among ad partners, given the impact that the same change has had on X’s ad business.

But Meta’s looking to assure ad partners by implementing some variances in its approach.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal:

“Meta has told advertisers that Community Notes will apply to organic posts, not paid ads, but its official messages haven’t gone into detail about brands’ and influencers’ unpromoted posts.”

That’s in variance to X’s approach, which does allow Community Notes to be added to any post, paid or not.

Which leads to situations like this:

Which these advertisers are justifiably not-so-happy about, but X owner Elon Musk says that he’s willing to take the potential revenue hit, in favor of greater truth.

Though with X’s revenue down 60% year-over-year, likely leading to a significant loss, that approach could change in future.

From a moral standpoint, however, this is arguably a better approach, providing more transparency in advertising. But evidently, Meta’s not as willing to take on the associated risk, and the impact that it could have on its key revenue stream.

So advertisers can breathe a sigh of relief, though influencer marketers may still have some concerns, especially for branded content.

Meta allows advertisers to pay influencers to promote their products, with branded content tags attached for transparency. And Meta hasn’t clarified if these will also be exempt from Community Notes, once Meta implements them.

I suspect that they will be, as this is another key element of Meta’s broader ad business, even if the company doesn’t directly benefit from such campaigns. But if Meta wants to maximize its ad revenue, this is another consideration, and it’ll be interesting to see how Meta looks to approach this element when its Community Notes are activated, which is expected to happen in the next few weeks.

But really, not even Meta itself has all the answers as yet. The rushed implementation of Community Notes, in order to appease President Trump, hasn’t been mapped out as yet, and Meta hasn’t even figured out the full details of what it will mean, and how it will initiate an effective community-sourced system for its 3 billion users.

That’ll be a much bigger undertaking than it was on X, which is still refining its own Community Notes approach.

In other words, it’s all in flux, and we’ll find out the full detail as Meta does.