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TikTok introduced a system for crowd-sourced debunking in the United States on Wednesday, joining other tech platforms in using a community-focused method to tackle online misinformation.
The Footnotes feature, which started testing in April, enables approved users to provide written context for potentially incorrect or misleading content, similar to Meta’s Community Notes and X’s system.
“Footnotes draws on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content,” Adam Presser, the platform’s head of operations and trust and safety, said in a blog post.
“Starting today, US users in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos, and our US community will begin to see the ones rated as helpful and rate them, too,” he added.
TikTok reported that nearly 80,000 users in the US, who have had their accounts for at least six months, have been accepted as Footnotes contributors. The app boasts approximately 170 million users based in the United States.
It added that this feature will complement the platform’s current integrity efforts, which include marking unverified content and collaborating with fact-checking organisations to evaluate the accuracy of posts.
The concept of crowd-sourced verification gained popularity through Elon Musk’s platform X; however, researchers have consistently questioned its effectiveness in reducing misinformation.
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A recent study revealed that over 90 per cent of Community Notes on X are never published, indicating significant limitations in their effectiveness.
The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) conducted research on the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes released by X from January 2021 to March 2025.
TikTok warned that it might take time for footnotes to be published as contributors learn to navigate the feature.
Research has indicated that Community Notes can help clarify certain falsehoods, such as misinformation about vaccines, but experts have long suggested that it is most effective on topics with widespread agreement. Some researchers have also pointed out that Community Notes users may be inclined to target political rivals based on their partisan views.
