ABC to continue using Twitter despite ‘government-funded media’ label

The ABC will continue posting to its official ABC News account on Twitter despite carrying a “government-funded media” label, as broadcasters in the United States plot exits from the social media platform in protest.

The designation first appeared on the ABC’s official news account on Monday, warning the account’s 2.1 million followers that any account carrying the label “may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content”.

According to Twitter’s current policy, the platform uses “external” sources to determine which accounts get hit with the tag, linking out to Wikipedia’s “publicly funded broadcasters” category page. 

“The ABC doesn’t currently have any plans to shut down all its Twitter accounts,” an ABC spokesperson told Crikey on Monday. “We’re liaising with Twitter regarding changes to account verification and labels.”

The move emerges as the latest in a series of scattershot changes to Twitter’s treatment of media on the platform since Elon Musk’s US$44 billion takeover in October last year, which has seen The New York Times stripped of its verification badge and others falsely branded state-affiliated media.

On Saturday, the US’ Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) announced it would stop using Twitter after the platform branded the outlet “government-funded media”. And on Friday, National Public Radio (NPR) announced it would stop using Twitter over the platform’s arbitrary labelling system, one week after the broadcaster was branded “state-affiliated media”, the same tag given to Russia’s propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik. The changes came in the wake of comments from Musk himself, who called for NPR to be “defunded”.

“NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” the broadcaster said in a statement on Wednesday last week. 

In a note to staff the same day, NPR chief executive John F Lansing encouraged reporters to steer clear of the platform, and warned that tweeting “would be a disservice” to the broadcaster’s journalism. 

The BBC was also hit with the “government-funded media” label, which the British broadcaster pushed back against last week on a technicality. It drew attention to the fact that its funding is drawn from a licensing fee collected directly from UK residents, not from the British government.  

“The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” the broadcaster said.

Older versions of Twitter’s labelling policy show both NPR and the BBC were granted exemptions to the platform’s approach to attaching “state-affiliated media” tags because they have “editorial independence”. 

The board-controlled ABC also adheres to a legally binding charter, which requires the broadcaster to maintain “independence and integrity” and to ensure that the “gathering and presentation” of news is “accurate and impartial”.

As it stands, the ABC receives government funding on three-year cycles, along with whatever revenue it collects from commercial activities of its own. Last year, Labor committed to extending the funding cycle to five years to better enable the broadcaster to plan into the future, and to safeguard funding from cuts.