When you're watching vids online, are you going to stop and read the footnotes?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

TikTok is going to be testing a new crowdsourced fact-checking system called footnotes.

It's inspired by the community note systems already in use on other social media, such as X and Facebook.

TikTok's also keeping its current fact-checking systems in place.

The way these community systems generally work is, say someone makes a post stating,

whales are the biggest fish out there.

Another user could add a note saying, actually, whales are mammals, and here's a source with more information.

I asked Vanderbilt psychology professor Lisa Fasio why this model of citizen fact-checking is catching on.

X developed this community note system that we're now seeing spread to other communities.

And it has a lot of positives.

Members of the community can catch misinformation that might go unnoticed by the platform

itself.

And we know that community members often do have relevant knowledge

that helps to provide context, extra information. But I think platforms are also turning to this

because it takes heat off of themselves. When they put up a fact check, when they make

decisions around content, they have to stand by those decisions, they sometimes get

heat for it. When it's something that the community has done themselves, it allows them to put

some distance between the platform and the decision. Unlike meta, TikTok is actually keeping

its partnerships with professional fact checkers. How do you think this combination of amateur and

pro fact-checkers will work? In a good system, the kind of amateurs are able to use what the

professionals find to kind of quickly produce these kind of community notes. So I think in a

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