After a dispute with public broadcasters, Twitter refrained from providing information on the funding of media organizations. According to AFP, a number of media outlets in Western countries as well as Russia, China and other countries no longer displayed these labels on Friday, including the US broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR), the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, the Kremlin-affiliated foreign medium RT and Canada’s public legal broadcaster CBC.
Reference to government influence
The short message service originally introduced the markings to indicate possible state influence on reporting. Twitter owner Elon Musk started a dispute with the media because he had the US public broadcaster NPR first labeled as state-controlled and later as government-funded. The station countered that it was editorially independent and received less than 1 percent of the $300 million annual budget from government funds. Markings for other stations followed.
The company, which was acquired last year by technology billionaire Elon Musk, had for years labeled media from authoritarian countries such as Russia and China as “government-funded”, but recently extended the label to media that receive state funding but report independently.
NPR and CBC then halted their activity on Twitter, and this week Sweden’s public radio station Sveriges Radio (SR) followed suit. Radio New Zealand also threatened this week to pull Twitter over labeling it “government-funded”.
Musk took over the short message service last October for $ 44 billion (today around 40 billion euros). In the course of a chaotic restructuring of the platform, the pugnacious entrepreneur fired top Twitter management and more than two-thirds of the 7,500 employees. According to critics, hate speech and misinformation on the platform have since surged. Twitter has repeatedly had to deal with technical problems in recent months and has lost many advertising customers.
