Swedish radio station leaves Twitter

Swedish Radio said its decision was made because Twitter had become irrelevant to Swedish listeners, rather than blaming Twitter's new policy of labeling many public broadcasters as government- funded.

hydroelectric radio station twitter image 1 — Photo: Reuters

US broadcasters NPR and PBS and Canada's CBC also left Twitter this past week, after the social media company added new labels to their accounts identifying them as "government-funded media."

The BBC is now being labelled by Twitter as a “publicly funded media outlet”. Major Western broadcasters argue that there is a clear distinction between publicly funded but editorially independent outlets and those run by governments.

Swedish radio has been on Twitter since 2009. They had 7.4 million weekly listeners in 2021. They said Swedes' interest in Twitter has been waning, citing a report that said only 7% of Swedes use Twitter daily, compared to 53% of Facebook users and 48% of Instagram users.

Christian Gillinger, head of social media at Swedish Radio, said most of the accounts would be deleted and others would be labeled as inactive. Individuals working at the broadcaster would still be free to use Twitter if they wanted to.

However, Gillinger said it was concerning that Twitter had reduced its workforce, and that this could negatively impact its ability to handle bots, misinformation, and hateful content on the platform. “Of course, those are factors that we have to consider when we decide to not operate on the platform,” he said.

Quoc Thien (according to AP)

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