YouTube has announced the launch of an experimental feature that’ll allow users to add notes below videos to correct inaccurate or misleading information. This new program, still without an official name and similar to “Community Notes” on Twitter, will initially be available to selected contributors in the United States who have an active and violation-free channel, among other requirements.

“Viewers in the United States will start seeing notes on videos in the coming weeks and months,” YouTube explains in a blog post. “In this initial pilot project, external evaluators will rate the usefulness of the notes, which will help train our systems. These evaluators are the same ones who provide feedback on search results and YouTube recommendations. As the pilot project progresses, we will also attempt to have collaborators evaluate the notes themselves.”

According to the platform, this is an experimental feature and there may be issues that need to be gradually polished. “The pilot will be available for mobile devices in the United States and in English to start,” YouTube said. “During this testing phase, we anticipate there will be errors (thumbnails that don’t fit well with the video or potentially incorrect information) and that’s part of how we’ll learn from the experiment.”

YouTube will allow users to rate the usefulness of notes, which theoretically will improve the system. The platform will use an “algorithm based on approaches” to consider these ratings and determine which notes are published, helping to identify useful notes from different perspectives: “If many people who have rated the notes differently in the past now rate the same note as useful, it is more likely that our system will display that note below a video”.

Disinformation on the Internet is a huge challenge that has become even more critical in the last decade. Far from being a minor problem, its spread has had serious impacts on our world, affecting the 2016 US presidential elections, in which Donald Trump won after a major disinformation campaign on social media, and the 2020 pandemic, where dozens of anti-vaccine hoaxes were spread, causing hundreds of people to refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19.