Meta says it has begun a gradual test of its Community Notes system in 16 Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. The test opened on September 9, 2026, but notes written during this initial phase will not be visible to users.
The countries covered are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Meta says its independent fact-checking programme will continue normally in all 16 countries while it builds a contributor base and evaluates the product. The announcement does not set a date for making notes public or for reducing independent fact-checking.
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What changed
Eligible people in the 16 countries can register to write and rate contextual notes on public posts. During the test, however, no note will be displayed to ordinary users.
Meta describes Community Notes as a collaborative system for adding context to potentially confusing or misleading posts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Contributors can add notes to public posts, including posts by Meta, Meta executives, political figures and other public personalities. Any user, whether or not they are a contributor, can request a note for a particular post.
The immediate change is therefore an infrastructure and recruitment test rather than a public moderation rollout. Meta is collecting contributors and testing the system while leaving its existing independent fact-checking programme unchanged.
To qualify as a contributor in the Latin American test, a person must:
- be at least 18 years old;
- have an account or Page that is more than six months old and has no policy violations; and
- have either a verified phone number or two-factor authentication enabled.
Meta says the full implementation will be assessed country by country. A later migration from independent fact-checking to Community Notes would be gradual and conditional on building a contributor community and establishing that the product works correctly.
How Community Notes works
A community-notes system is a form of collaborative content annotation. Users write explanations attached to public posts, while a separate rating and publication mechanism determines whether a note meets the requirements to be shown.
Meta says its notes are written and rated by programme contributors rather than by Meta employees or independent fact-checkers. A note does not become visible simply because it receives a majority of votes. Instead, Meta says publication requires sufficient agreement among contributors who typically disagree with one another.
That design is intended to reduce reliance on one-sided or simple-majority voting. Agreement across normally differing contributors could make it harder for a single organised group to determine which notes are published. It does not, by itself, establish that a published note is accurate.
Meta also says the system uses automated signals to detect manipulation, doxxing and content that violates its Community Standards. Internal teams are intended to identify coordinated groups and inauthentic behaviour.
These safeguards are part of Meta's description of the system; the supplied announcement does not provide independent measurements showing how accurately they work.
Why the test matters
If Meta eventually deploys Community Notes across the region, it would change who performs a central part of its platform-integrity workflow. Contextual explanations would be written and rated by a broader community of users instead of being supplied primarily through a programme involving independent fact-checkers.
That could allow contextual annotations to cover a larger number and wider variety of posts. It also introduces questions about how contributors are recruited, whether they represent sufficiently diverse viewpoints, how quickly notes appear and how the system handles coordinated attempts to influence ratings.
Meta launched Community Notes in the United States in January 2025. It says that, by the time of the Latin American announcement, more than 1.4 million contributors in the United States had produced more than 50,000 posts, while more than 200 million people saw a note there during July.
Those figures are company-reported. The announcement does not provide the methodology behind them, an external audit or comparative evidence showing that Community Notes are more accurate, faster or less biased than independent fact-checking.
The US figures also do not establish how the system will perform in Latin America. The new test has no published country-by-country figures for contributors or note volume, and notes are not yet visible to users in the participating countries.