The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) announced it will temporarily cease its Twitter activities, following its labelling by the platform as “government-funded media.”
The CBC, which received more than $1.2 billion in federal government funding in the 2021-22 fiscal year, said it rejects the labelling.
“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,” CBC’s director of media relations Leon Mar told The Epoch Times in an email on April 16.
The CBC is not the first outlet to leave the site after being given a “government-funded media” label.
On April 12, National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States announced its organizational accounts would no longer be active on Twitter after it was given the label.
NPR said Twitter was “taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”
A day later on April 13, the U.S.’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) also announced it would quit Twitter after being labelled “government-funded media.”
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the United Kingdom was also given a “state-affiliated media” label, which was later changed to “publicly-funded media” since it is funded via license fees. It has not announced its intention to leave the platform.
