The CBC has returned to posting content on some of its Twitter accounts following a more than three-week hiatus after the platform labelled the public broadcaster’s main account as a “Government-Funded Media” outlet.
“Today, we will resume some activity on a handful of umbrella Twitter accounts, including @CBCNews, but we will significantly reduce our overall Twitter footprint and continue to assess the platform against our strategy,” said CBC News editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon in a
blog post on May 9.
Twitter initially placed the label on CBC’s main account on April 16, but then
changed it to “69% Government-Funded Media” a day later after the network complained that the original label was inaccurate because CBC creates some of its own revenue through advertising.
CBC then said on April 17 that it would be
halting its Twitter activity because the label “suggested” that its journalism and editorial content was directly influenced by the federal government.
In terms of direct funding, CBC
received over $1.2 billion from the federal government last year, according to its 2021-22 annual report.
Twitter removed the contentious label from CBC’s account after about three days, but the public broadcaster still did not resume its activity on the platform.
“We are reviewing this latest development and will leave our Twitter accounts on pause before taking any next steps,” CBC’s director of media relations, Leon Mar, told The Epoch Times on April 21.
‘Reviewing and Adjusting’
On May 4, The Epoch Times again asked Mar if CBC had any plans to resume its activity on Twitter, but he said the network is continuing to “consider our options” and would keep its Twitter accounts on pause.Along with removing CBC’s government-funded label on April 21, Twitter also removed the “state-affiliated media” tags it had placed on outlets such as the Russian government’s RT and Beijing’s state-run CGTN.
Fenlon
wrote in his blog post on May 9 that the CBC’s pause on Twitter came at a time when the public broadcaster had already been “reviewing and adjusting its social media strategy for more than a year” apart from the fact that Twitter under Elon Musk’s ownership labelled it as government-funded.
Fenlon also noted that Twitter removed its blue-check verification from its accounts around the same time that it labelled CBC’s main account as government-funded.
This change, which came on April 20, was due to Twitter’s new policy dictating that users must be subscribed to Twitter Blue, which costs US$8 monthly, to have the blue checkmark verification.
However, CBC’s accounts are still verified with Twitter’s
gold checkmark and square profile picture features, which are granted to accounts that Twitter
acknowledges as “an official business ... through Twitter Verified Organizations.”
