TikTok users in the United States will soon see crowdsourced fact-checking appear on the platform alongside videos. The company announced that the app is starting to introduce Footnotes, which is a version of Community Notes.
TikTok announced its plan to introduce the feature back in April, and since then, nearly 80,000 users have been approved as contributors. Footnotes work in a similar way to community notes on X. Contributors can add notes to videos with false claims, artificially generated content, or those that require additional context. Contributors must cite the source of the information they provide, and other contributors must rate the footnote as useful before it goes public. Like X, TikTok will use a connection algorithm to determine which notes have reached a “broad level of consensus.”
According to the screenshots shared by the company, the footnotes will appear prominently below the video caption. Users will be able to read the full text of the note and view a link to its original source.
Although TikTok is the latest major platform to adopt a crowdsourced approach to fact-checking, unlike Meta, the company still continues to work with professional fact-checking organizations, including in the United States. The company also notes that Footnotes will be subject to the same content moderation standards as the rest of the platform, and that people can report notes that may violate its rules. However, the presence of a note will not affect whether a particular video can be recommended in the “For You” feed.
The company is not currently making any commitments to roll out the system outside the United States. “We chose the U.S. market because it’s quite large and has a content ecosystem that can support such tests,” said Erika Ruzic, Head of Product Integrity and Authenticity at TikTok, during the press event. “Over the coming weeks and months, we will be evaluating how our pilot project goes in the US and deciding if we want to expand it to other markets.”
The Footnotes trial comes at a time when the company’s future in the United States is still in some uncertainty. President Donald Trump has postponed a potential ban three times since taking office in January, as a long-promised “deal” to create a U.S. company for TikTok has yet to materialize. A month ago, Trump said the deal could be announced in “two weeks.” Since then, there have also been reports that TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, is working on a new, US-only version of the app in anticipation of a deal. TikTok representatives declined to comment on these reports, which suggest that such an app could debut in early September.
