Yesterday, the CBC along with the ‘Global Task Force’, consisting of other national media broadcasters from other countries, demanded Twitter remove the “government-funded media” label and replace it with “publicly-funded media”.
The CBC deemed the “government-funded media” label as misleading, claiming it suggested the broadcaster’s editorial independence was influenced by the federal government.
Now, it seems the CBC may have been granted its wish, as the public broadcaster’s Twitter profile no longer has “government-funded media”. Actually, there’s nothing showing at all.
While it looks like Twitter removed the label after the CBC’s request, it seems like this may be a bug. That’s because all media outlets, even those from actual state-affiliated media accounts, don’t have their Twitter labels anymore either.
Media outlets such as RT, backed by the Russian government, and Al Jazeera, funded by the government of Qatar, also have had their “state-affiliated media” labels axed. It seems like yesterday’s removal of legacy checkmarks has seemingly removed media labels as well.
Check out the RT Twitter bio as of writing:
…and Al Jazeera’s:
Other Twitter bios from the BBC, PBS, NPR and more also have “funded” labels removed. These organizations also disagreed with their “funded” labels on Twitter.
For now, the CBC no longer has any labels whatsoever on its Twitter account. The public broadcaster quit Twitter after it disagreed with the “government-funded media” label. The CBC’s 2022 funding from Canadian taxpayers was $1.24 billion.
Update April 21, 12:12pm PDT:
It appears this is not a mistake after all. According to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn, he says Elon Musk confirmed to him that Twitter has dropped all media labels. “This was Walter Isaacson’s suggestion”, said Musk when asked why. Isaacson is writing Musk’s biography and previously write Steve Jobs’ biography as well.
NEW: Elon Musk tells me Twitter has now dropped all media labels. Asked why, Musk says: “This was Walter Isaacson’s suggestion.”
— Bobby Allyn (@BobbyAllyn) April 21, 2023
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Media outlets that have heavy state influence, like RT and others in China, have long been complaining about their labels which have indicated clearly that the state has a major influence on their content. I’m betting that the removal of these labels from all media outlets isn’t the result of the complaints of the BBC and CBC but rather that Elon has some good friends who themselves have good friends in Russia and China who have hated these labels that point out the lack of authenticity of their reporting.
Either that or the team at Twitter finally realized that pretty much every media outlet in the world has received government funding of some form so they would have to add it to everyone which would make it meaningless.
The team at twitter are a few tweets short of a full thread. I don’t think there is a lot of method to their madness. Its operation is more akin to the whims and capriciousness of a small child whose brain is not yet fully developed. And the king of the man-children is at the top.
Complaining about their labels like.. CBC is? I don’t understand your reasoning. It looks like everyone is on equal footing now.
Yes, they are all on the same footing now, but that’s exactly the problem. Some of these things do not look like the others. Even people who don’t particularly like the CBC or BBC will recognize that they are on a different level to Russia’s RT and Sputnik, or China’s Xinhua. Those latter agencies are very much state-run media and are under very heavy control by their respective rulers. On CBC’s worst day, they aren’t even close to RT or Xinhua who can’t even hint at any criticism of the government. CBC and BBC both criticize the government on a daily basis. However now all of these media outlets are being treated the same now and that’s not what we had even just a few weeks ago. And thosestate-run outlets have friends who are friends of Elon. So I’m wondering if all of this kerfuffle was in aid of justifying a removal of the labels on those heavily state-run media outlets. Sounds like the sort of “distraction play” I could see coming from those folks. This is a page right out of their playbook.