YouTube faces, like many online services, to the impossibility of moderating in detail all the content that is published in them. This is especially evident in social networks, where disinformation proliferates to the point that it has become a basic tool of virtually any initiative related to the manipulation of public opinion, with a huge problem that it poses both to its users and to those responsible for these services.

In this sense, and considering that this problem is nothing new, in late 2020 Twitter began testing a new moderation system, initially called Birdwatch, and a few months later, in early 2021, it began offering access to users. You may not be very familiar with this name, but it didn’t take long to change its name to its current one, Community Noteswhich, if you are a user of the mentioned social network, will be much more familiar to you.

The previous leadership of Twitter started with a relatively slow rollout of Birdwatch, but Elon Musk accelerated it significantly once the social network came under his control, and as I’ve mentioned on occasion, I think it’s one of the biggest successes he’s had since then. that the acquisition was completed. And since we don’t have the capacity to have the necessary moderation teams, there are few better solutions than involving the community itself in monitoring this type of content. as already accredited on Twitter.

Having a good example is always good news and today we are facing such a case as we read on their official blog, YouTube has begun testing community context notes. At the moment, they’re only available in English, for the United States, and through mobile apps, but if it works well (and there’s no reason to think otherwise, other than the need to make some adjustments), we can expect that just like , what happened with Twitter is expanding to other languages, countries and methods of access.

For now, access to the ability to add notes has been limited to just what was previously hinted at (language, country and device). As it is currently in the testing phase, Google suggests that It is only available to a certain number of users, without specifying whether any specific criteria were used for their selection or whether the selection was random. Yes, the option to waitlist to start adding notes has been enabled as stated.

Although some aspects of its operation still remain unknown, there is no doubt The implementation of community notes on YouTube is a huge successwhich some will surely call censorship (even though its implementation on Twitter has made it clear that it is not), but which will serve to filter out some of the immense amount of harmful content that is published daily.