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Twitter has placed the tag “government-funded media” on several media outlets’ Twitter pages, including Australian public broadcasters ABC News and SBS.
The tag is one of three designations that Twitter uses to classify media institutions that receive public funding, the other two being “state-affiliated media” and “publicly-funded media.”
According to Twitter, “Government-funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”
News outlets and media practitioners affected by Twitter’s decision are decrying the move, as it can imply that governments have a significant level of control over editorial policies.
Before Elon Musk’s turnover, the tags were reserved for outlets like RT and CGTN, which have been associated with Russian and Chinese governments.
Despite receiving part of its funding from the Australian federal government, SBS maintained that it retained full editorial discretion and said the tag was inappropriate.
“While we appreciate Twitter’s motivations with regard to transparency on its platform, we believe a “Publicly-funded media” label better reflects the hybrid public-commercial nature of our funding model and the fact that SBS retains full independence from Government in our news editorial and content decision making,” said an SBS spokesperson in a statement.
ABC News echoed this statement in a tweet, stating that their editorial policies as a publicly funded broadcaster are “enshrined in legislation.”
“For more than 90 years the ABC has always been and remains an independent media organisation, free from political and commercial interests,” ABC News said.
“For Twitter to represent [SBS and the ABC] or other broadcasters that obtain their funding from government as government broadcasters is simply dishonest and misleading and clearly designed to send a kind of coded message to the world that the public broadcaster is no more than government mouthpieces,” said Dr Dennis Muller, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.
“In both cases, there are legislative protections for the public broadcasters which prevent them from being used for the sorts of propaganda purposes that a term like government funding implies,” said Muller, who also worked as a journalist and editor for 27 years.
In response, some news outlets such as US-based Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) have quit using Twitter altogether.
“NPR will no longer actively maintain its flagship Twitter (@NPR) or any other official NPR accounts, and we are officially deemphasizing Twitter across the organisation,” the NPR said in a statement.
“We believe this label is intended to call in question our editorial independence and undermine our credibility. If we continued tweeting, every post would carry that misleading label,” they said.
For its part, the ABC said they are not planning to follow NPR and PBS’ footsteps, preferring to engage in talks to get a ‘more accurate’ designation.
“The ABC doesn’t currently have any plans to shut down all its Twitter accounts. We’re liaising with Twitter regarding changes to account verification and labels,” they said.
