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CanadaBC is leaving Twitter due to its tweets carrying the label "government-funded Media". This is particularly suprising, as unlike BritishBC or NipponHK, which are given government monopolies, but don't get money directly from the fiscus, CBC does. The Canadian state budget has an explicit provision that appropriates money appropriated from Canadian taxpayers to CBC.
The CBC on its own website even admits this fact in what might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen. If one isn't careful to look closely at the Y axis, one might miss that numbers from $700m to $1700m are omitted, thus making the 71.2% of the 2018/2019 budget which was given to it by the state, appear more 40%.
Both of these facts (objecting to being labeled GFM and the deceptive graph) point to CBC apparently thinking getting funds from the fiscus isn't a "good luck", thus it seeks play down this fact, by hook or by crook.
But why? Why would it be more shameful for a newsources sources of money be decided representatively democratically, where each person rich or poor has approximatelly the same weight, than if it were owned by a billionaire like Bezos?
I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words. If I owned twitter and slapped 'Murdoch owned media' on Fox twitter accounts, it would be indisputable but it clearly implies something about what I think about Fox and its biases. Similarly, Musk/twitter surely thinks that the fact that a particular outlet is government funded in some way impinges negatively upon its content because otherwise there would be no point putting it there.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with wrong with being government funded, but the label still carries unfortunate implications. After all, there are plenty of twitter users who will not be attuned to the difference between the Russian or Syrian regime shills labelled 'government affiliated media' and the state broadcasters labelled 'government funded media', and if not putting them in exactly the same bucket twitter does seem to be putting them in the same region, or at least that is the impression some people will take.
Getting a tag isn't inherently negative. A bluecheck is technically also a tag that some people think negatively about, but on average it's still mainly a positive. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain kind of person would actually trust publications with a "government owned" tag more than one without, and the position that argues for this is mostly rather consistent and plausible, even if I may disagree with it (or more precisely, I think the funding matters for the direction, but not the degree of the bias).
On the other hand, I does seem to be rather petty from Musk, and I would actually prefer if everything gets a tag for its funding, not just public institutions. But I'm also in general someone who likes having lots of categories for everything.
I agree that this is twitter's intention. Nevertheless, unlike "hate speech" or similar tags that also may be technically correct according to some strenuously interpreted definition, most of the media currently up in arms are a) rather unambiguously government funded according to any sensible definition and b) "government funded" itself is not really a negative word in most context, even if the tag-givers in this specific context think it is, so it's easy to simply use it as a more informative tag anyway.
I would understand it if twitter chose "government propaganda" or similar labels that are much more contentious and clearly negative. To me this is just a really bad look; Twitter may think this is something negative on-net, but still deliberately uses a rather neutral & unambiguous word and people try to wriggle out of the label anyway with what looks like the platonic ideal of "lying with stats and figures". I'm not a fan that Twitter applies this labeling in a somewhat one-sided way, but it's still miles better than how other media has started using scary words for everything they don't like.
Sure, but now we're talking about something else. If the CBC wasn't trying to fool us this witlessly and simply tweeted something along the lines "yes, we're government funded, no, that's not a bad thing" and/or followed up with another "due to recent events, we do not have the impression that staying on twitter is beneficial for us, so we are leaving", our discussion would look quite different.
I think a moderate amount of hostility between different platforms/institutions/powerful actors is very good for society in a similar way to the idea of the separation of power in the government. Hence, I think that Twitter being run by a controversial person like Musk is positive for the world, and I think it's a pity if everyone starts migrating to services that are again a little to friendly with the hegemonic media/academia/political consensus position. But it's not really something I'd fault anyone in particular for. It's only natural that you move to where you feel most comfortable & welcome.
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