Negotiating Free Speech and Content Moderation: User Reactions to Meta’s Community Notes on Facebook and Instagram

Social media platforms are increasingly reshaping content moderation through participatory governance models. In January 2025, Meta announced that its third-party fact-checking program in the United States would be replaced by Community Notes, raising questions concerning platform governance, freedom of expression, epistemic authority, and misinformation. This study examines how commenters interpreted this policy change through a comparative qualitative content analysis of comments posted in response to Mark Zuckerberg’s official Facebook and Instagram announcements. Following research authorization, we examined 1000 top-level comments per post through the Meta Content Library research environment. After applying the eligibility criteria, the analytical corpora comprised 1535 English-language comments: 895 from Facebook and 640 from Instagram. Eligible comments were manually coded according to evaluative stance, argument type, and communication tone. Opposition to Community Notes was more frequent in the Facebook corpus (61.7%) than in the Instagram corpus (43.4%). Facebook comments more frequently provided explicit ideological, epistemic, technological, and comparative justifications, whereas Instagram contained a substantially larger proportion of comments without an explicit argument (43.6%, compared with 11.5% on Facebook). Constructive communication was the predominant tone in both discussion environments (60.0% on Facebook and 58.8% on Instagram), and the proportions of the three communication tones were similar in the two coded corpora. Overall, the study provides a situated account of how commenters interpreted and negotiated collaborative moderation and platform governance across two specific discussion environments.