Canadian public broadcaster CBC has said it is effectively shutting down Twitter, becoming the latest news organization to challenge new labels assigned to the site by billionaire Elon Musk.
In a statement Monday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and French-language version Radio-Canada said Twitter had added a “government-funded media” label to their account.
As a result, the broadcaster explained that it was “pausing” its activities on the platform. It denounced the label as “false and deceptive”.
“Twitter can be a powerful tool for our journalists to communicate with Canadians, but it undermines the accuracy and professionalism of the work they do to falsely portray our independence in this way,” the CBC said.
As a “Crown Corporation”, the CBC does receive funding through parliamentary votes. But a spokesperson for the news agency noted that editorial independence was protected by Canada’s broadcasting law.
Twitter has defined “government-funded media” as “outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement in editorial content.”
Our journalism is impartial and independent. To suggest otherwise is not true. That’s why we pause our activities @Twitter. | Notre journalism is impartial and independent. Prétendre le contraire is fake. C’est pourquoi nous suspendons nos activités sur @Twitter.
— CBC/Radio Canada (@CBCRadioCanada) April 17, 2023
The CBC’s response follows a similar protest from Radio New Zealand (RNZ), also a public broadcaster, which threatened to leave the site on Monday.
“Our editorial independence is not only protected by law, we vigorously guard it,” chief of content Megan Whelan said in a statement on Twitter.
In the United States, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) also announced last week that they were pulling out of Twitter after being subjected to labels that they said misrepresented their editorial independence and funding models.
Several state public broadcasters followed suit in recent days.
NPR is stepping away from Twitter, and so is this NPR Politics feed. Read the thread to find other ways to find our work, including:
NPR Politics Instagram: https://t.co/UJ2HzXYsR0
NPR Politics newsletter: https://t.co/mrWXwUrXrn https://t.co/5kmu5kGogV— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) April 12, 2023
In Canada, Twitter’s decision to label the CBC “government-funded” was supported by some conservative politicians.
Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilièvre applauded the move on his Twitter account, calling the CBC “propaganda” for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “not news”.
The conservative leader had previously said he personally wrote to Musk urging the CBC to receive the “government-funded” label. Poilièvre has also called for the news organization to be disbanded.
In response, Trudeau accused Poilièvre on Monday of “attacking this Canadian institution, attacking the culture and local content that is so important to so many Canadians”.
Musk took control of Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October. A self-described “free speech absolutist”, he has long been troubled by Twitter’s content moderation policies, which he has since relaxed.
But since Musk’s acquisition, critics have accused the billionaire of contempt for press freedom on the platform.
Musk briefly suspended the accounts of certain journalists after they shared publicly available information about his jet’s location. And last month, Musk announced that all press inquiries to Twitter would be automatically answered in the form of a poop emoji.
As of Monday, Twitter listed three categories to describe ties to news organizations: “state-affiliated,” “government-funded,” and “government-funded.”
NPR was initially listed as “affiliated with the state,” which Twitter defines as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial means, direct or indirect political pressure, and/or control over production and distribution.”
Twitter later changed the NPR label to “government-funded” amid criticism that the original tag placed the outlet in the same category as propaganda for Russia and China.
Meanwhile, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was initially listed as “government-funded”, but has since been given the “government-funded” tag, which Twitter defines as “media organizations that receive funding from licensing fees, individual contributions, public funding and commercial finance”.
In an interview with the BBC last week, Musk said of the labeling decision: “I thought it was a way to be as truthful and accurate as possible”.
Writing for the Brookings Institution research group, Courtney Radsch, a fellow at the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, argued that the labeling is misleading because it overlooks other forms of government aid received by a range of media outlets around the world .
“The terms state-controlled and government-funded raise questions about the usefulness of using such blunt terms and the failure to include information about how other news media is funded and operated,” she wrote.
The selective application of labels to some news media and not to others also raises concerns about perception and consistency.