HELSINGFORS – Sweden’s public radio said this week it would stop being active on Twitter, but it did not blame new labels Elon Musk’s social media platform has slapped on public broadcasters, prompting some major North American channels to stop tweeting.
Sveriges Radio said on its blog that Twitter has lost its relevance to the Swedish audience.
National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, meanwhile, have pointed to Twitter’s new policy of branding them as government-funded institutions, saying it undermines their credibility.
“Sveriges Radio has long deprioritized its presence on Twitter and has now taken the decision to completely stop being active on the platform at the same time as we close down a number of accounts,” says Christian Gillinger. head of the broadcaster’s social media operations.
Citing a recent study showing that only about 7% of Swedes are on Twitter daily, he said the platform “has simply changed over the years and become less important to us.”
– The audience has simply chosen other places to be. And therefore Sveriges Radio now chooses to deactivate or remove the last remaining accounts, says Gillinger.
The broadcaster’s news service, SR Ekot, which has been branded “publicly funded media”, will remain on Twitter but has been marked inactive.
Sveriges Radio, which has been active on Twitter since 2009, also noted the “recent turbulence” surrounding Twitter’s operations and said it was worrying that the social media platform has reduced its workforce “dramatically”.
“We believe that in the long run it could affect the company’s ability to deal with things like fake accounts, bots and disinformation but also hate mail and threats,” Gillinger said.
The labels for public service companies have sparked a new battle between reporters and Musk, who has said he wants to elevate the opinions and expertise of the “average citizen.”
CBC ‘pauses’ Twitter after ‘government-funded media’ label.
Canada’s CBC said Monday it would pause its operations on Twitter after it was labeled “government-funded” because it “undermines the accuracy and professionalism” of its journalists’ work “to allow our independence to be misrepresented in this way.”
American broadcasters NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service made similar decisions earlier this month for related reasons.
In the US, National Public Radio abandons Twitter
The CBC received C$1.24 billion ($925.86 million) in government funding in fiscal year 2022, compared with revenue from advertising, subscriptions and other sources of C$651.4 million ($485,000,000) in its annual report, Reuters reported this week.
Reuters quoted editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon as saying: “The real issue is that Twitter’s definition of state-funded media means open to editorial interference by the government. As the editor-in-chief of CBC News has said, the government has no โ zero โ involvement in our editorial content or our journalism .’
Source: sn.dk