Twitter has removed labels describing global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated, a move that comes after the Elon Musk-owned platform started stripping blue verification checkmarks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee.
Among those no longer labeled was National Public Radio in the U.S., which announced last week that it would stop using Twitter after its main account was designated state-affiliated media, a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China.
Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — said it was still misleading.
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PodcastSteve
News organizations would do well to consider alternatives to Twitter that are not at the mercy of a mercurial plutocrat who has made it a playground for hate speech and false information.
Mastodon is an open-source federated messaging platform that allows any organization to set up its own server and control/moderate the content there. It connects to other servers and essentially replicates the Twitter experience without being at the mercy of a single owner. Each publication could then verify its own journalists and moderate the content going across their server. Everyone would know who was real and who was spoofed.
It's only a matter of time before Twitter collapses completely. It's really time for media and organizations seeking to communicate with the media to move away from it to something more reliable.
Friday, April 21, 2023 Report this