YouTube Is Testing Its Own ‘Community Notes’ Feature

Update 8/8/2024: YouTube has begun sending invitations to participate in testing the new Community Notes feature, as spotted by 9to5Google. Eligible users can sign up by opening the YouTube app, tapping their profile picture in the bottom right corner, tapping the cog next to Settings, and toggling on Help Inform Viewers under the General tab. YouTube has also posted a new support page with additional details, including guidelines for writing notes.

This article’s original text follows below:

Pretty soon, you might start to see notes across videos on YouTube. The Google-owned video-sharing platform is now testing an experimental system that will be similar to X’s Community Notes, which lets users add context to different posts—usually as a means to limit the spread of misinformation.

YouTube’s equivalent of the feature will only be available on mobile in the United States to start, and it’ll only support English at first. “This could include notes that clarify when a song is meant to be a parody, point out when a new version of a product being reviewed is available, or let viewers know when older footage is mistakenly portrayed as a current event,” YouTube’s blog said.

Credit: YouTube

There are, of course, a lot of uses for a system like this, especially on a platform like YouTube. The YouTube Team says that it expects mistakes to be made throughout the testing phase, and that some notes probably won’t be a great match for a video. From these hiccups, YouTube hopes to get a lot of feedback about the quality of notes, as well as how to improve it over time so that it can be expanded on in the future.

To start with, the YouTube Team says that only a limited number of eligible contributors will be invited to the program, and that the invites will come via email and through the Creator Studio. Eligibility will be based on whether a user has an active YouTube channel in good standing.

You’ll be able to rate notes that appear publicly under a video during the experiment. Ratings will include options like “helpful,” “somewhat helpful,” or “unhelpful,” as well as a box for you to input a reason why you selected your rating. This will help the team determine which notes should stay and which should be published using a bridging-based algorithm.