Meta’s community notes won’t apply to paid ads. Marketers still have questions.
Summary
The new system could make marketers more cautious about organic posts on Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms assured advertisers this week that its “Community Notes," which will let users crowdsource annotations on posts that they believe are false or need context, won’t apply to paid ads when they arrive later this year, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversations.
Advertisers have been waiting to learn how they will be affected since Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Jan. 7 that he was ending the company’s fact-checking and introducing Community Notes in its place.
Meta’s Community Notes will resemble those of social-media platform X, where volunteers propose and approve addendums to posts that they think need more information. X’s system applies to both paid and unpaid posts, however, and ads for brands from Apple to Uber have been called out in attached user notes for making allegedly false or misleading claims. Some of the brands have deleted ads that were marked with such notes.
Community Notes on Meta platforms will be enabled for organic content, meaning posts that Meta hasn’t been paid to promote.
That includes influencers’ sponsored posts that Meta hasn’t been paid to boost, as well as organic posts on brands’ own accounts, according to a message from a Meta employee to ad buyers viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Aspects of the program remain in flux. Brand and influencer organic posts might not be subject to Community Notes when they first go live, for example, a person familiar with Meta said.
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.
A Meta spokesman said the company will evaluate and improve Community Notes as they roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. “Any assertions about how the product will work aside from what we’ve already officially communicated are pure speculation," the spokesman said.
Meta is a staple of many companies’ marketing strategies. The company collected a record $40.59 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2024, up 19% from the period a year earlier, according to its most recent earnings report. Ninety-six percent of that revenue came from ad sales.
Organic sponsored posts—such as a content creator being paid to showcase a product—have historically made up about 25% to 50% of brands’ marketing campaigns on Meta’s platforms and TikTok, said Ryan Stern, co-founder and chief executive of influencer marketing firm Collectively. Creators rely on this sort of material to fill out their branded-content earnings, and brands use it to complement the posts they do pay to boost, she said.
Meta’s new system might push more advertisers and creators to abandon organic content altogether to avoid the risk of critical Community Notes, said Lia Haberman, a consultant who teaches social-media marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I think we’re going to see the disappearance of sponsored content on creator pages," Haberman said.
Confusion remains the overarching mood as brands try to figure out how their paid and organic messages will be affected, said Darren D’Altorio, vice president of social media at digital ad firm Wpromote.
“We’re all kind of waiting together on the timelines and the specifics," D’Altorio said.
Write to Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com
