RTÉ HAS SAID it “has no current plans to pause its use of Twitter” in the wake of policy changes by the company with regard to media organisations that receive government funding.
New labels identifying certain publishers as publicly-funded now appear in a prominent position beneath the accounts’ usernames.
Several media organisations including the USA’s National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Canadian public broadcaster CBC, and Swedish public radio station Sveriges Radio, have all announced in recent days that they would no longer be posting on Twitter.
Irish state broadcaster RTÉ now has a note on its Twitter page marking it as ‘Publicly-funded media’.
According to Twitter, “publicly-funded media refers to media organisations that receive funding from license fees, individual contributions, public financing, and commercial financing”.
NPR, PBS and the CBC have been labelled as ‘Government-funded media’. Twitter had originally labelled these accounts ‘State-affiliated media,’ the same label that is used for state-controlled media organisations, such as China Xinhua News.
In a statement yesterday, a spokesperson for CBC said: “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 allow our independence to be falsely described in this way.”
NPR have characterised the label as “inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence”. Similarly, a representative for PBS said said the broadcaster receives more funding from members of the public and from philanthropic organisations than it does from the government.
Twitter pages operated by the BBC had also originally been labelled as ‘Government-funded media’ until the organisation corrected the company.
“The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” noted the broadcaster in a statement disputing Twitter’s characterisation. The label has since been changed to ‘Publicly-funded media’, the same designation as RTÉ.
In a statement made to The Journal today, an RTÉ spokesperson confirmed that there were no current plans for the organisation to halt its Twitter operations, and did not comment more generally on the policy change.
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