Mon 17 Apr 2023:

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/Radio-Canada) is suspending its activities on Twitter following the social media platform’s decision to label them as a government-funded outlet, CBC said on Monday.

“Our journalism is impartial and independent. To suggest otherwise is untrue. That is why we are pausing our activities on Twitter,” CBC said in a statement via Twitter.

The decision comes following Twitter’s decision to apply the “government-funded media” label to CBC’s Primary account, which was also recently applied to US state-funded outlet National Public Radio.

The label has typically been used to designate media outlets whose editorial independence is allegedly impacted by their government ties.

CBC is a so-called crown corporation, mandated by Canada’s Broadcasting Act. The CBC is managed by a board of directors and held responsible by the Canadian Parliament, with its financing including government funding.

Meanwhile, Twitter is rolling out more “government-funded media” labels on the accounts of international news outlets. These include the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC Australia), Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ, Sweden’s SR Ekot and SVT, and Catalonia’s TV3.cat.

Twitter Labels Prominent French Media Corporations As ‘Publicly-Funded Media’

Three prominent state-owned French media corporations, France Medias Monde, France Televisions and Radio France, have had their Twitter accounts labeled as “publicly-funded media” due to the financing the companies receive from the government.

Under Twitter guidelines, media companies are labeled as publicly-funded if they “receive funding from license fees, individual contributions, public financing, and commercial financing.”

The French government holds 100% of shares in all three media corporations, which own well-known broadcasters France 24, France 2, France 3, radio stations RFI, France Inter, Franceinfo and other media networks.

New Zealand radio threatens to quit Twitter over ‘government’ tag

New Zealand’s public radio broadcaster has threatened to leave Twitter following Elon Musk’s decision to label certain media accounts as “government-funded”.

Radio New Zealand’s head of content Megan Whelan said on Monday that the label, which Twitter uses to describe outlets that “may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content”, does not reflect the broadcaster’s editorial independence.

“Not only is our editorial independence protected by the law, we guard it vigorously,” Whelan said in a statement posted on Twitter.

“Over the next few days, we will be considering our options, including talking to Twitter to have the label removed or revised, or as other public media around the world have done, leave the platform.”

RNZ’s statement comes after publicly-funded National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service in the United States quit Twitter in protest against what they view as Musk’s efforts to undermine their legitimacy.

Twitter has in recent days added the “government-funded” label to publicly funded outlets, including the UK’s BBC, Canada’s CBC, Voice of America and Al Jazeera, after an earlier decision to apply a “state-affiliated media” tag to NPR drew a backlash.

In 2020, Twitter’s administration reported that it had begun tagging media pages that it believed were under the control of the authorities, as well as the accounts of the authorities of permanent members of the UN Security Council, key government officials, including foreign ministers, ambassadors, official representatives and major diplomatic leaders.

Until recently, the label had typically been applied to Twitter accounts of state media outlets in non-Western countries such as China and Russia that were alleged to lack editorial independence. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that Twitter’s decision to label media outlets from Russia as government-funded or state-affiliated is a manifestation of double standards and a violation of democratic principles, adding that it considered “politicized and tendentious actions by US IT giants as an attempt to squeeze Russian media content from the international information space, reducing its quotability.”

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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