TikTok is getting its own version of community notes

TikTok has announced “Footnotes,” its own take on the community notes features that started on Twitter and have been spreading to other social networks. As elsewhere, it’s a crowd-sourced approach to moderation — TikTok says contributors will be able to “add relevant information to content on our platform.”

US users can apply to become Footnotes contributors starting today, as long as they meet TikTok’s requirements, including that they must have been on TikTok for more than six months, must be 18 or older, and can’t have violated any community guidelines in the previous six months. The company says it will also notify US users who already fit its requirements.

Here’s how TikTok describes the process for publishing Footnotes:

Footnotes will use a bridge-based ranking system designed to find agreement between people who usually have different opinions, inspired by the open-sourced system that other platforms use. It works by allowing contributors with differing opinions to leave and vote on the helpfulness of a footnote. Only footnotes that meet the threshold for “helpful” will be visible to the community, at which point the broader community can vote on it, too. The more footnotes get written and rated on different topics, the smarter and more effective the system becomes.

TikTok says the feature will be “tested in the U.S. for short form videos” and that it will open access to contributors “over the coming months.”

After debuting on Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, a fact-checking program reacting to online misinformation, crowd sourcing context has become a popular alternative to platform-led moderation, having spread to YouTube and Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in recent months. TikTok reportedly laid off an unknown number of its trust and safety staff in February, but today says this feature “augments our existing suite of platform integrity measures and features.”