The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s primary Twitter account is now officially identified as “Government-funded Media.”
Twitter applied the state funded media label to the @CBC account on Sunday afternoon. Around the same time the label also appeared on the accounts of ABC News, RNZ and Australia’s and New Zealand’s public broadcasters.
The new tag “Government-funded Media” applied to CBC’s Twitter account is different than the “state-affiliated media” that BC Rise reported being applied to the CBC’s account in January of this year.
Earlier this month, Twitter labelled many BBC accounts in the United Kingdom as well as PBS and NPR in the United States as government-funded media. In reaction to the accurate labels, PBS and NPR decided to quit using Twitter.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre sent a letter to Twitter calling on Twitter to accurately label CBC as a government-funded media company
“Government-funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content,” Poilievre wrote. “As a result, and in the interest of transparency, I believe that Twitter should apply the Government-funded Media label to the CBC’s various news-related accounts, including @CBC, @CBCNews, and @CBCAlerts.
A CBC spokesperson responded to Poilievre’s letter saying that is “clearly not the case” that the government is involved in over editorial content.
“As every Canadian knows, CBC/Radio-Canada is publicly funded. Its editorial independence is protected in law in the Broadcasting Act,” the CBC spokesperson told CBC.
CBC’s affiliated accounts, such as @CBCPolitics and @CBCNews have so far evaded the government-funded media label but it’s unclear if that will change in the future.
The new policy for “government and state-affiliated media account labels on Twitter” appears to have launched earlier this month making a few changes.
In the previous policy BC Rise reported earlier this year was from January 17, 2023 which had a policy for “How government accounts are defined” and “How state-affiliated media accounts are defined.”
Twitter’s new “government and state-affiliated media account labels on Twitter” policy now covers four scenarios.
- How government accounts are defined
- How state-affiliated media accounts are defined
- How government-funded media accounts are defined
- How publicly-funded media accounts are defined
The CBC was slapped with the “How government-funded media accounts” label which is defined by Twitters as:
“Government-funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content. We may use external sources similar to this one in order to determine when this label is applied.”
CBC’s French language arm, Radio-Canada currently doesn’t have the label on its account.
