Just weeks after Meta announced that it would be replacing its long-standing fact-checking system with a crowd-sourced alternative modeled after X's Community Notes, TikTok has now stepped into the same territory with a new feature called Footnotes.
The idea is simple and familiar: let the users help police the content. According to TikTok's press release, Footnotes is designed to "give our community more context" by allowing select users to add information to videos, aiming to make the content on the platform more understandable or at least more transparent. Right now, it's rolling out as a U.S.-only test for short-form videos.
Community Notes began life at Twitter in early 2021, back when it was still called Birdwatch. The idea was to bring some kind of crowd accountability to misinformation without relying solely on top-down moderation or third-party fact-checkers.
Elon Musk inherited the project when he took over Twitter, renamed it to X, and then gave the whole system a bit more visibility and reach. Despite some hiccups, it stuck and now it's spawning clones.
Footnotes contributors have to meet a few basic requirements, like being over 18, having a clean track record on the app, and sticking around for at least six months. Once approved, they'll be able to add notes and rate others' submissions. Only notes deemed "helpful" by contributors with differing viewpoints get pushed to the wider public.
The feature uses what TikTok calls a "bridge-based ranking system," which basically just means it's looking for consensus across people who normally disagree. That's more or less how Community Notes works, too.
In fact, TikTok even says it is inspired by "the open-sourced system that other platforms use," which is probably the closest it is going to get to saying "yes, we copied X."
None of this is going to be a silver bullet, though. Community-driven moderation sounds great in theory, but X's own Community Notes have shown how messy it can get in practice.
A 2024 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the system missed most of the misleading election posts it was supposed to flag. Notes either weren't added or weren't visible to the public before the content had already done its damage.
And to be clear, TikTok still runs traditional fact-checking in the background, working with IFCN-accredited organizations across dozens of languages and countries. Footnotes aren't replacing that system; they are just adding another layer to how the platform handles misinformation and context.
TikTok is currently in the middle of a high-stakes political fight in the U.S. ByteDance, the app's Chinese parent company, is still under pressure from Washington to either sell its U.S. operations or face a ban.
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