TikTok announced that its “Footnotes” feature is officially launched, which is designed to replace X’s “Community Notes”. In the coming weeks, US users will start seeing these annotations on videos and have the opportunity to write and rate them.
TikTok describes footnotes as a way to bring "additional written context" to videos, a feature the company first announced in April.
Footnotes provide additional textual context for the video. A footnote can share a researcher's perspective on a complex STEM-related topic, while another footnote can highlight new statistics that paint a more complete picture of an issue.
The function looks like this:
Since then, nearly 80,000 users have qualified as contributors, the company said. To join the program, you must be in the United States, be 18 years or older, have an account that is more than six months old and has not violated any recent guidelines.
The mechanism that determines which notes can be published is called the "bridging system." Rather than relying on a simple majority vote, the algorithm specifically seeks consensus among contributors who have historically "dissented." A note will only be made public if it is rated useful by those who generally disagree with its views. Contributors must also cite sources for their opinions.
The "footnotes" system is very similar to X's fact-checking system, Community Notes. The feature has its own history, initially launching as a pilot project called Birdwatch in January 2021 before Elon Musk renamed it and expanded it globally.
This crowdsourced approach to content moderation is becoming an industry trend, with other companies like Meta launching nearly identical systems for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Of course, allowing the public to annotate videos comes with its own set of challenges. TikTok acknowledges this and plans to use a combination of automated systems and human reviewers to spot annotations that violate its guidelines. Users can also report any footnotes they find inappropriate. The company also said the annotations will not affect how the video performs in the algorithm.