Meta Community Notes data feed exposed

TLDR

• Indicator says a Meta dashboard data feed appears to hold all helpful Community Notes from the previous 24 hours.¹
• Indicator classified 6,519 notes from 4 October to 3 November; about a quarter concerned US politics.¹
• Meta only publishes a dashboard linking about 40 helpful notes; it declined to comment on data sharing plans.¹

Indicator reported on 4 November that it collected a month of Meta Community Notes by using a data feed behind the company's public dashboard, giving researchers a route to data that Meta does not officially release in full.¹

Why it matters: Meta's Community Notes replaced third-party fact-checking in the US, and Meta has not published the full data that the Oversight Board asked for. A feed that appears to cover most helpful notes lets investigators count, classify and track notes across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. It is an undocumented route, so its coverage and continuity are not guaranteed.¹

Driving the news:

• Indicator says the dashboard itself links to 40-odd helpful notes from the previous 24 hours, but exposes a feed that appears to contain all of them. Over the month, helpful notes ranged from 119 to 369 a day.¹
• A Meta spokesperson told Indicator that an average of 240 notes a day are published, which Indicator says is roughly in line with its count. The company confirmed the portal does not hold notes from the recent expansion to Spanish-language Latin American countries.¹
• Method: Indicator used Claude Haiku through an API to read 6,519 notes posted on Facebook, Instagram and Threads between 4 October and 3 November and decide whether each concerned US politics. It manually reviewed 5 percent and agreed with the ratings 90 percent of the time.¹
• Results: about a quarter of notes concerned US politics, with a higher share on Threads and Facebook than on Instagram. Indicator counts 1,669 political notes and says many were not fact checks and instead often provided unnecessary context or opinions.¹
• Indicator also says Meta used to forbid fact-checkers from flagging false posts by politicians, so the relatively limited number of notes on politicians' content is a change.¹

The big picture: Indicator says the Oversight Board said in March that Meta had promised to publish Community Notes data "on par" with X, which the Board took to mean note text, geographies, ratings, status history, enrolment and requests for notes.¹ The Board's 26 March policy opinion, in a summary, recommends ongoing data gathering, assessment and reporting on how Community Notes function in practice, and raises concerns about abuse by coordinated disinformation networks.²

The other side: Meta declined to comment on its data sharing plans, according to Indicator.¹

Single-source note: the findings rest on Indicator's own collection and classification. Only the opening part of the article was accessible without a paid subscription, so the narrative breakdown, the cited-source analysis and the findings on named politicians were not reviewed. The Oversight Board's wording on data parity was not checked against the full Board text, and the dataset itself was not inspected.¹²