"Meta has told advertisers that Community Notes will apply to organic posts, not paid ads, but its official messages have not gone into detail about brands' and influencers' unpromoted posts," the WSJ reports.
On January 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be replacing fact-checking with Community Notes -- a form of content moderation popularized by X that relies on users' individual and collective concerns over in-app content.
Unlike X's Community Notes process, which applies to both paid and unpaid posts, Meta plans to implement its own Community Notes system in relation to organic content, not posts that the company has been paid to promote.
While this will likely be seen as a positive clarification for brands, as the content format has negatively challenged some ads on X, Meta has not provided specific details about other types of posts, such as influencers' sponsored posts that Meta has not been paid to promote and organic posts on brand accounts.
Zuckerberg's decision to end fact-checking and switch to Community Notes -- a move that earned immediate praise from President Donald Trump -- has resulted in widespread panic from ad partners, many of whom are forced to compare the future of Meta's ad business to X's.
"I think it's safe to say that no one predicted Elon Musk's chaotic takeover of Twitter would become a trend other tech platforms would follow, and yet here we are," SOCi's director of marketing insights Damian Rollison told MediaPost, adding that this likely means that "Facebook and Instagram will see a spike in political speech and posts on controversial topics."
"As with Musk's X, where ad revenues are down by half, this change may make the platform less attractive to advertisers," Rollison adds. "It may also cement a trend whereby Facebook is becoming the social network for older, more conservative users and ceding Gen Z to TikTok, with Instagram occupying a middle ground between them."
"With fewer checks in place, there is a risk that ads may appear next to unverified content, which could impact user trust and engagement," director of product marketing and Digital Remedy Gabrielle Turyan told MediaPost. "As a result, advertisers will need to reassess their brand-safety settings, update exclusion lists, and implement additional content certification measures. Monitoring performance closely will also be key to identifying any impact on ad effectiveness."
Turyan believes that as a result of Meta's content-moderation changes, many brands may also begin to shift their ad spend to competing platforms that offer more control over targeting and content environments, like CTV and OTT, which she says "provide the security of high-quality, brand-safe inventory."
Meta's decision to protect paid ads from the potential wrath of Community Notes is not surprising, considering that the company collected a record $40.59 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2024, which was up 19% from the previous year, with 96% of that revenue coming from ad sales, according to Meta's earnings report.
This is not the first time Meta has put up guardrails to protect its ad partners. According to MediaPost writer Laurie Sullivan, internal documents from 2023 obtained by the Financial Times show Meta exempting "P95 spenders" who spent over $1,500 per day "from advertising restrictions" and appointing more intensive, human-led reviews.