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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

CBC Pushes Back On Twitter Label


Public broadcaster Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on Tuesday pushed back against Twitter's move to label it "69% government funded media," saying it had complete editorial independence, reports Reuters.

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform had on Sunday stamped CBC with a label that said it was government-funded media, after placing similar notices for U.S. broadcasters NPR and PBS.

"Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they're 'less than 70% government-funded', so we corrected the label," Musk said in a tweet on Monday.

In an emailed statement, a CBC spokesperson said that Twitter's response was not "serious."

"The real issue is that Twitter's definition of government-funded media means open to editorial interference by government. As the Editor-in-Chief of CBC News has said the government has no — zero — involvement in our editorial content or journalism," the statement quoted Editor-in-Chief Brodie Fenlon as saying.

CBC received C$1.24 billion ($925.86M) in government funding in the 2022 financial year, compared with revenue from advertising, subscriptions and other sources of C$651.4 million according to its annual report.

According to Reuters, Swedish Radio announced on Tuesday it was quitting Twitter, the first major European public broadcaster to join three from North America that abandoned the social media platform in the past week.

Swedish Radio said its decision had been made because Twitter had lost relevance for a Swedish audience, not blaming a new policy by Twitter under owner Elon Musk to label more public broadcasters as government funded.

"The audience has simply chosen other places to be. And therefore Sveriges Radio now chooses to deactivate or delete the last remaining accounts," Christian Gillinger, head of Social Media at Swedish Radio, said in a blog post.

U.S. broadcasters NPR and PBS and Canada's CBC quit Twitter in the past week after the social media company added new labels to their accounts designating them "government-funded media".

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