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With its new ‘footnotes’ feature, the platform is betting on crowdsourced context to clean up the chaos of viral video culture.
TikTok’s endless scroll has always been a cocktail of brilliance, absurdity, and the occasional conspiracy theory. For every dance challenge or cooking hack, there’s a dubious wellness tip promising to fix your gut in three days or a breaking news claim with no evidence beyond a shaky iPhone video.
The company knows this – and after heavy-handed backlash from users, it now seems to be rolling out a solution: ‘Footnotes’, a feature designed to crowdsource context and fact-checks, launched in the U.S. last month.
Footnotes is essentially TikTok’s answer to ‘Community Notes’ on X – short, user-written clarifications that appear beneath posts when there’s a need for additional context. But instead of Elon Musk’s often chaotic experiment with digital truth-telling, TikTok is framing Footnotes as a way to inject clarity and accountability into a platform notorious for viral misinfo.
Around 80,000 TikTok users have already signed up to write and rate Footnotes. When someone leaves a note on a video – say, linking to a reputable news source, other users can vote on whether the note is helpful. If a few agree, the Footnote goes live under the video for everyone else to see.
It’s a kind of peer-review system for the For You Page. And like any good peer-review system, it’s self-correcting: users can also report Footnotes they think are misleading or off-base, and TikTok says the tool will get smarter as more people use it.
In theory, this adds a second layer of visibility. Not just what’s going viral, but what’s verifiably true.
The timing isn’t accidental. TikTok is under pressure on several fronts: political scrutiny in the US, accusations of fueling misinformation during elections and global crises, and an increasingly skeptical user base.
According to The Verge, the company has been testing iterations of Footnotes since 2022, but the full-scale rollout suggests TikTok is ready to lean into the idea of community-driven credibility.
