Twitter continues to be re-envisioned by its pronatalist owner Elon Musk. This week the label ‘government-funded media’ appeared on the accounts of the ABC and SBS. A few days earlier in the US the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) quit Twitter after their accounts were similarly labelled ‘government-funded media’.
One reason why this label chafes is because it’s true. The ABC and SBS are government-funded. And while the ABC is Australia’s most trusted news source, the ways it is funded and managed open the potential for political interference. In the context of Australia’s highly concentrated media ownership, this leaves Australians susceptible to a polarised and politically parallel media landscape.
However, this label misses such crucial nuance on the issue that it implicates Twitter itself as a source of undue influence. For media watchers, the key concern is whether news organisations use their disproportionate influence to barrack for the causes and cohorts of their choosing, and whether massive media moguls are acting as kingmakers. Yet those media organisations with extensive ties to political parties and whose ranks include former members of parliament receive no indicative label. Further, the ABC and SBS have robust charters and guidance that commit them to take an impartial stance. The same is not always true for private news organisations.
What’s more, flagging government funding and vulnerability to interference is a very different concern for a relatively robust democracy such as Australia than for authoritarian regimes. There is little to distinguish the labels for the ABC and SBS from those for Russian and Chinese media, even though the government influence on these sites is not just potential but active and easily identifiable.
There are many reasons to be leery of the news we find online – a problem made worse by the flood of AI-generated churnalism on the horizon. The question is: are these labels illuminating? Or are they merely fodder for Elon Musk’s conspiratorially-inclined fan base and the authoritarian governments he is accommodating?
Tim Koskie, CMT researcher