Global Courant 2023-04-21 15:36:56
Twitter on Thursday removed the “government-funded media” tag on public broadcasters, including the CBC, without explanation.
The move came after the Global Task Force for Public Media called on Twitter earlier today to correct the description of public broadcasters in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
The group led by CBC president Catherine Tait had said that Twitter applied the label without warning to the accounts of CBC/Radio-Canada, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (known as ABC), the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Radio New Zealand (RNZ). .
It noted that Twitter’s own policy defines government-funded media as media that can have varying degrees of government involvement in editorial content.
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The task force said this was not the case here, where editorial independence is protected by law and enshrined in editorial policies.
It said the most accurate label would be “government-funded media”.
Twitter initially labeled several accounts at the British Broadcasting Corporation as “government-funded media”, but changed that to “government-funded media” after the BBC objected.
The BBC is also a member of the Global Task Force, as are France Télévisions, Germany’s ZDF and Sweden’s SVT.
“labeling them in this way misleads the public about their operational and editorial independence from the government,” the task force said in a press release Thursday.
CBC made similar objections, and Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief and executive director of programs and standards for CBC News, explained why the media organization paused activity on its Twitter accounts.
“We cannot in good conscience continue to post or engage in fact-based news and information on Twitter while allowing a false impression of government involvement in our work to persist,” Fenlon wrote. “As a news organization committed to truth, facts and accuracy, we cannot abide by a label that promotes disinformation about who we are and what we do.”
The “China state-affiliated media” tag on Xinhua News accounts and those of journalists associated with government-backed publications also disappeared Friday, days after they were applied. It was a similar case for Russia Today and its journalists.
Checks disappear
Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk ushered in several changes after he bought Twitter for $44 billion US last October.
One of the changes was to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to keep them, and it looks like Twitter started delivering on that promise on Thursday.
Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system it started about 14 years ago — many of them journalists, athletes, and public figures. In addition to protecting celebrities from impersonators, one of the main reasons for the audit was to provide an additional tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people.
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High-profile users who lost their blue diamonds on Thursday include Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey, and former President Donald Trump.
One of Musk’s first product moves after acquiring Twitter was to launch a service that awards blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was soon overrun by impostors, including accounts posing as Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, and Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 per month for web users and $11 per month for users of the iPhone or Android apps. The fees for keeping the numbers range from a starting fee of $1,000 per month to verify an organization, plus $50 per month for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify individual accounts, as was the case with the previous blue check handed out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.
Subscribers would see fewer ads, post longer videos and have their tweets appear more prominently.
The withdrawal is not expected to be an income bonanza
It wasn’t just celebrities and journalists who lost their blue checks on Thursday. Many government agencies, nonprofits, and public service accounts around the world were no longer verified, raising concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergency situations.
While Twitter offers gold checks for “verified organizations” and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it’s not clear how the platform dispenses them, and they weren’t seen on many previously verified agency and public service accounts on Thursday.
The official Twitter account of the New York City government, which previously had a blue check mark, tweeted Thursday, “This is an authentic Twitter account representing the government of New York. This is the only account for @NYCGov that is being run by the New York City government” in an attempt to clear up the confusion.
A newly created spoof account with 36 followers, also without a blue checkmark, disagreed: “No, you are not. THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account represented and controlled by the government of New York City.”
According to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of social media tracking software, fewer than five percent of aging verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue as of Thursday.
Digital intelligence platform Compareweb analyzed how many people had signed up for Twitter Blue on their desktop computers and found just 116,000 confirmed signups last month, which at $8 or $11 per month doesn’t represent a major revenue stream. However, the analysis did not consider accounts purchased through mobile apps.
