TikTok is taking a bold step to confront the spread of misinformation on its platform by rolling out Footnotes, a community-driven fact‑checking program designed to add crucial context to videos. Starting in the coming weeks, U.S.-based users will begin seeing these Footnotes on selected videos—and, importantly, will be empowered to rate and contribute to them themselves.

The journey to this launch began in April 2025, when TikTok invited users to join the Footnotes pilot. Participation required a minimum six‑month tenure on the platform without recent community violations, ensuring contributors were both experienced and accountable. Since then, nearly 80,000 U.S. users have qualified to become Footnotes contributors. These “super‑users” can write contextual notes on videos they deem misleading, then rate others’ notes for accuracy and helpfulness. Once consensus is reached—when a note is deemed “helpful” by multiple contributors—it becomes visible beneath the video for the wider U.S. audience.

TikTok says its ranking algorithm will improve over time, learning from contributors’ input across diverse topics. Users who encounter Footnotes also have the option to report any notes they believe violate community guidelines, creating a self‑policing ecosystem. “Footnotes uses a bridging‑based system to find consensus between people with different opinions,” TikTok explained, echoing the philosophy behind X’s Community Notes.

How Footnotes works

1. Submission: Qualified contributors write a brief explanatory note adding context, links to external sources, or corrections to potentially misleading content.
2. Rating: Other contributors then evaluate submitted notes, voting on their accuracy and helpfulness.
3. Display: Notes that achieve a threshold number of positive ratings are published as Footnotes on the video, visible to all users.
4. Review: Any user can flag a Footnote that seems inappropriate or violates guidelines, prompting further contributor review.

TikTok emphasizes that Footnotes will initially appear only on original videos, not on duets, stitches, or paid advertisements. This focus ensures the feature targets creator‑generated content where misinformation risks are greatest.

TikTok is not alone in exploring crowdsourced fact‑checking. X (formerly Twitter) pioneered the approach with Community Notes (initially Birdwatch), now boasting over 130,000 contributors who have added millions of context notes since 2022. Meta has followed suit, deploying Community Notes–style tools across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. YouTube, too, is piloting a similar feature to help flag misleading videos.

This industry‑wide pivot reflects growing recognition that traditional moderation—relying solely on AI filters and in‑house teams—struggles to keep pace with the volume and nuance of online content. Crowdsourcing leverages the collective intelligence of diverse users, but also brings challenges in ensuring fairness, preventing abuse, and maintaining speed.

Studies of X’s Community Notes provide valuable lessons. Research published in early 2025 found that attaching community fact‑checks reduced the spread of misleading posts by roughly 45%–62%, depending on the metric, and increased the likelihood that authors would delete false content by over 100%. However, these studies also highlighted timing issues: notes often arrive too late to curb early viral spread, and engagement with the notes remains far lower than engagement with the original posts.

Moreover, critics warn that crowdsourced systems can be vulnerable to coordinated manipulation or bias, particularly on hot‑button topics. To mitigate this, TikTok’s bridging‑based consensus seeks to balance inputs from users across the political and cultural spectrum. The platform will need to fine‑tune these mechanisms continually, ensuring that Footnotes remain trustworthy and resistant to bad‑faith actors.

Footnotes are part of a larger suite of safety and well‑being tools TikTok unveiled at its New York office update. Alongside community‑driven content labeling, TikTok previewed enhanced parental controls, screen time trackers, and in‑app wellness resources, such as breathing exercises and nature soundscapes. These measures build on initiatives like Family Pairing (2020) and teen screen time limits (2023), reflecting TikTok’s growing focus on digital well‑being as its user base now covers nearly half of the U.S. population.