Originally published at: CBC "pauses" Twitter use after it gets the dreaded government tag | Boing Boing
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The 5D chess master’s plan proceeding as expected…
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This statement is fractally correct. I think it could be the title of his autobiography.
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Antagonizing the people who create content for you for free is just good business. It doesn’t take an MBA to figure that out, but it helps.
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The whole point of having an independent but government funded media is so that you can actually get independent news/media coverage. If it’s about transparency, twitter, Fox etc. should be labelled “billionaire-funded media.”
The other thing to remember is that CBC, unlike NPR, does a lot more than just produce news or news-adjacent content. Much of that 70% goes to subsidizing the production of radio and television content that has nothing to do with news. Likewise, in Canada at least, Global, CTV and CityTV also receive subsidies and tax credits to produce Canadian content and support local news, for which they are not being called government funded media.
Populists love making a tempest in a teapot. The challenge is that, as with many things in a democracy, the independence of government funded media is founded on convention. So it is easy enough for populists to create straw-men about how governments abuse that convention when they say mean (but fair) things about them. And in the process they manage to undermine public trust and erode democracy further, which is what they want.
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He’s sniggering like Beavis and Butthead over that “69%”.
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While gleefully acknowledging that it is misinformation that he is just making up! He sucks in ways that I have difficulty fully comprehending along all of it’s n-dimensional axes. It’s like the end of 2001 but Dave is saying “My God, it’s full of shit”
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Exactly. Conservatives have been calling for cutting CBC funding for years, when they weren’t calling for it to be scrapped entirely in favour of private networks, precisely because the CBC is independent and they can’t turn it into their own version of Pravda.
See: Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party and friend of Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and Truckers Convoy insurgents.
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At the very least “For-profit media.” If we’re listing financial motivations, why leave anyone out? Ideally, this would all mean not-for-profit media like ProPublica would get the best treatment, being truly independent. Though, I suppose he’d just come up with a “woke-funded media” tag or something. And also think-tank rags would technically fall into this category…
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Muskrat: “Someone is still using Twitter! Let’s drive them away!”
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The CBC should really be running their own ActivityPub servers (such as Mastodon). A presence on the Fediverse would be beneficial for them, as it would stop their messages from being blocked by algorithms.
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I’d hate to play Devil’s advocate but; PBS, NPR and the CBC have been labeled as such by YouTube for quite a while now but you don’t see them stop posting videos there.
If Elon was actually serious about such labels he should have an source/committee outside of his company to decide on such labels to avoid being seen as an biased label and cut the childish bullshit like he did to the CBC. More context outside of a single sentence on a profile page would do wonders for both sides of the beef.
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If the label is there on Youtube, it’s pretty obscured by the noisy interface and multiple tabs (I can’t find the label at a glance). The whole point of twitter is an efficient economy of display, limiting character count, limiting header details, “clean” interface. Adding this additional label to the account masthead stands out as significant because it is one of maybe 4 total pieces of information allowed/displayed…
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If Elno is in a labeling mood, he could label all the Postmedia accounts, including the Toronto Sun, as (thanks to Harper) “American right-wing oligarch owned”.
That would do for Poilievre too.
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Eagerly awaiting Tesla & SpaceX’s “Government-Subsidized Enterprise” Twitter tags.
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You lost me there. He’s just rich so people take him seriously.
Quite a different proposition.
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I think the difference here is that if CBC stopped receiving government funding, it would cease to exist overnight as it does look like 70% ($1.2B) of revenue is from Government (https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/impact-and-accountability/finances/annual-reports/ar-2019-2020/financial-sustainability/revenue-and-other-funds) - whereas the tax breaks are roughly $600 million across all media companies in Canada - so say Corus Entertainment (owner of Global News) made like 1.7 Billion in 2019 in revenue - their profit was like 585 million, and they paid like 70 million on that in taxes - so the tax break looks like $8-10M? https://assets.corusent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/corus_annual_report_2020.pdf
