Twitter is creating a storm among media organisations by labelling their profiles as “government-funded media,” or “state-affiliated media”, forcing many of them to pause their activities on the platform.
While NPR became the first major news organisation to stop using Twitter after the micro-blogging platform labelled first the account “state-affiliated media” and then changed it to “government-funded media,” on Friday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Canada also paused its activities on Twitter over being labelled "government-funded media", saying “our journalism is impartial and independent”.
"Twitter can be a powerful tool for our journalists to communicate with Canadians, but it undermines the accuracy and professionalism of the work they do to allow our independence to be falsely described in this way," said corporate spokesperson Leon Mar. "Consequently, we will be pausing our activity on our corporate Twitter account and all CBC and Radio-Canada news-related accounts."
Later, Twitter CEO Elon Musk trolled CBC and in a sarcastic gesture, tweeted: “Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they’re “less than 70% government-funded”, so we corrected the label.” Musk posted a screenshot of the CBC with the label “69% government-funded media”.
Earlier, the BBC objected to labelling its Twitter account "government-funded media." Musk in an interview with BBC later described the BBC as the "least biased" media outlet and announced that he would change BBC’s label on Twitter feed to "publicly funded" as “we are trying to be as accurate as possible.” And Twitter changed the label on the main BBC account to "Publicly funded media" from "Government Funded Media.”
On April 12 NPR CEO John Lansing called the label of “state-affiliated media” organization “unacceptable” on its Twitter profile even though Twitter had updated the label to “government-funded media.”
In his statement, Lansing says, “NPR's organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”
“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public's understanding of our editorial independence,” the NPR statement reads.
NPR has over 50 affiliated Twitter accounts and has around 18m cumulative followers.
“We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities. There are still plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content. Audiences can turn to NPR.org, the NPR app for on-demand listening, our newsletter portfolio, liveblogs and push notifications. We will also continue to maintain a presence on our other social platforms,” the statement reads.
After the NPR the US television broadcaster PBS also announced that it would stop tweeting after its accounts received the “government-funded media” label. The PBS has around 2.2 million followers.
“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” it said in a statement.
According to Twitter, "Government-funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet's funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content."
