Twitter recently announced that it will expand its experimental Birdwatch crowd-sourced fact-checking program to combat misinformation throughout the app.

Launched early last year, Birdwatch enables users to highlight information in Tweets that they believe are misleading and add notes to provide additional context. According to Twitter’s research, people who see a Birdwatch note are 20-40% less likely to agree with the substance of a potentially misleading Tweet than someone who sees the Tweet alone. Twitter also claims that people who see Birdwatch notes are 15-35% less likely to Like or Retweet a Tweet than someone who sees the Tweet alone.

Twitter will roll out an updated Birdwatch onboarding process, which will better incentivize contributors to write and rate notes in a thoughtful way. Until now, Birdwatch was a limited experiment with 15,000 contributors writing fact-checking notes. Twitter will now add about 1,000 new contributors per week, ahead of the U.S. mid-term elections.

The company will assign each potential contributor a Rating Impact Score. This score begins at zero and must reach “5” for a person to become a Birdwatch contributor — a metric that’s likely achievable after a week’s work, according to Twitter. Users gain these points by rating Birdwatch notes that enable the note to earn the status of “Helpful” or “Not Helpful.” They lose points when their rating ends up in contrast with the note’s final status.

The platform said that contributors can further increase their Writing and Rating Impact scores by both writing Helpful notes and continuing to rate notes written by others.

Until now, any participant having a verified phone number, no recent Twitter rule violations, and a minimum of six months’ timeline of using the app can apply to become a Birdwatch contributor. The process then cross-matches the contributions from Birdwatch participants to highlight the notes rated as most helpful, based on a range of qualifiers, with all Birdwatch notes available for anyone to see.

Criticism for Increasing Abuse on Platform Doesn’t Bode Well

Social media platforms, including Twitter, have long faced pressure on how to moderate content that appears in their services. Twitter continues to undertake initiatives to safeguard its platform and boost trustworthiness as well as continues to remove fake pages and accounts.

The company has been removing accounts that are abusive, spammy, fake or malicious. Although this initiative is expected to foster healthy conversation over the long term, it can hurt user base growth at least in the near term. Along with other social media companies, Twitter is also facing increased scrutiny over its data handling practices and privacy issues.

Shares of Twitter, currently carrying a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell), have declined 4.7% in the year-to-date period compared with the Zacks Internet – Software industry’s decline of 51.1%.

You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Intensifying competition for ad dollars and user engagement from the likes of Snap (SNAP Quick QuoteSNAP - Free Report) , Meta Platforms (META Quick QuoteMETA - Free Report) , Alphabet’s (GOOGL Quick QuoteGOOGL - Free Report) Google and TikTok is another persistent headwind. Snap is benefiting from improving user engagement, particularly in the 13-34-year-old demography, which is expanding its advertiser base. SNAP is also giving competition to META in the metaverse space. It collaborated with Vogue to feature a virtual try-on experience of select pieces from Balenciaga, Dior and Gucci, which will be available for snapchatters, globally.

META is pumping resources into developing AI to address solutions for megatrends like a hybrid work environment, which will drive its user base across various platforms like Meta Portal Go. Investments in AI are also expected to draw higher revenues from Meta’s ad business.

In its race to target TV ad dollars, Alphabet allowed third-party (Nielsen and comScore) tagging of YouTube videos to determine the effectiveness of ads on YouTube versus ads shown on TV. The Google Preferred program pulls out the top 5% of the most engaging content on YouTube for advertisers. Alphabet has also promised to advertise this content itself in order to boost traffic. Google Preferred is attracting spending on the platform. Mobile revenues on YouTube continue to grow and TrueView (where advertisers pay only when consumers see the ad) also continues to do well.

In the second quarter, YouTube’s advertising revenues grew 4.8% year over year to $7.3 billion, while Network advertising revenues increased 8.7% to $8.3 billion. Total Google advertising revenues grew 11.6% year over year to $56.3 billion and accounted for 80.8% of the total revenues.