Elon Musk has been making a point to label publicly-funded news organizations as such on Twitter. After he did it to NPR last week, CBC is the latest news outlet labelled as government-funded.
After CBC clarified that less than 70 percent of its funds come from the federal government, Musk altered it slightly to 69 percent in mockery of the claims. As a result of the labelling, CBC announced it will be pausing its Twitter accounts.
(1/3) Twitter’s own policy defines government-funded media as cases where the government “may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content,” which is clearly not the case with CBC/Radio-Canada. →
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre led the charge, imploring Musk to add the label, though he and fellow conservatives have not made the distinction between a government-funded news outlet and state media.
CBC is a Crown corporation that operates independently of the Canadian government. Moreover, the government does not implicate itself in any editorial decisions.
CBC is publicly funded. However, Twitter’s policies explain that the label would “provide additional context about accounts that are controlled by certain official representatives of governments, state-affiliated media entities and individuals associated with those entities.” As CBC stated in their response, this is not true for its organization.
An example of state media would be the Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Company where the government actively controls its editorial decisions. Their media arm is labelled as “state-affiliated” and not government-funded like CBC.
Twitter does not have public relations staff. When The Canadian Press emailed the site for clarification, it only received a response with a poop emoji.
It’s unclear if or when CBC will return to Twitter or if Twitter will ever make the distinction between government-funded news organizations and state media in its policies.
