Or, and this is weird, to the Australian ABC either, @ABCaustralia.
It’s almost like he’s only doing it to media organisations he’s personally heard of, and has no other guideline but his own feelings.
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which is 99.98% owned by the Finnish state
Clearly not state-owned!
(Who owns the other 0.02%? Hattifatteners?
)
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Associations, cultural institutions, insurance companies, banks, publishing companies, even a commercial television channel etc. There are around 70 shareholder.
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worse… would spacex exist without government funding? and tesla loves those subsides as much as anyone. a subsidy is funding if anything is…
https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives
etc
one has to question whether the royals are state. yes, the king is the head of state but in theory it’s a ceremonial role
plus, again, a fee passed from the people to a public organization is very different than an organization which gets its funds out of the government’s budget
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My feeling on that is does he still technically have the power? In the case of the BBC, he does, which is why the Royal Charter commanding the BBC to exist AND allowing it to exist in the name of the Sovereign is still a thing.
It’s not ceremonial if it’s required.
it’s not directing the government though. it’s a decree that affects the people. it tells the people to pay a fee to a non governmental organization.
it’s a distinction that matters, id think, if one wanted to be accurate. ( and i get that musk doesn’t care to be )
( eta: if the king wrote a check to the bbc, id agree with you. but it’s not that kind of funding at all. )
That just sounds like a tax by another name.
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i think who is doing the tax and how it’s applied matters.
it’s basically a passthrough from people to the bbc. to me, that’s not government funding. that’s a mandate yes, a tax definitely, but funding?
social security is similar in the us. yes, you have to pay it, but the government doesn’t pay for it. not a cent comes from the government budget. they don’t go into debt for it. they can’t increase or decrease the budget on a whim.
that kind of firewall creates a meaningful real world difference.
Everyone here considers social security a government program. 
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i was only using it as an example closer to home of how something can be a tax and yet not be funded by the government. ( social security is more approximately your own money coming back to you. not money paid by the government itself )
any similarity breaksdown after that because social security is managed by the government, while the bbc is not.
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If it’s not voluntary- it’s a tax. If it’s a tax ; it’s subject to government control. I’m sure the BBC meets with the government regularly regarding its coverage.
The influence may not be overt - but it exists- especially on high level employees.
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totally.
only musk isn’t saying it’s “funded by a licensing tax” he’s saying it’s “government funded media”.
i wouldn’t argue about most of the other european companies mentioned above because my understanding is they are funded through general taxation. their budgets come out of the government’s money.
the one he targeted is the least like what he thinks it is. ( along with npr, which also doesn’t fit the bill imo - not unless tesla, etc. also do )
( and really what he thinks it is, is government controlled. which it most definitely is not. )
eta: saw your edit. yeah, i mean, could the influence be reduced? yes, absolutely. the argument for public media is that there’s less corporate influence that way. and while i believe that whole heartedly, i definitely don’t think npr or the bbc are beyond reproach
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I don’t think that’s in dispute it’s just, as others have mentioned, how much influence does that have over their journalism. BBC journalists can be like attack dogs when questioning MPs or even the higher ups of the organisation because of how much they want to be seen as impartial. But none of this nuanced discussion we’re having here is reflected in twitter’s decision to slap that label on, it’s just El Faschy playing in his faschy sandbox.
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The BBC certainly is it’s own weird little undefinable category, isn’t it? I remember reading something that Douglas Adams said about it in passing back in a short 1995 essay about who the real customers of various business are:
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Twitter Circle has been buggy for months, but until now, there was not substantial evidence that private Circle posts were regularly breaching containment. As TechCrunch reported two months ago, Circle tweets often show up without the green banner that indicates they’re only shared with this select audience. Still, these tweets only showed up for people in the Circle, and you could figure out that they were Circle tweets since they would not be possible to retweet. While that bug was concerning in itself, this glitch that exposes private tweets is even more dangerous.
Going private to increase engagement isn’t just for the lieutenants, anymore.
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