Twitter has labeled personalized accounts of the BBC (@bbc) and US National Public Radio NPR (@npr) as «state-sponsored».
To the BBC account. si”, consisting of retweets about their entertainment programs, were followed by 2.2 million people.
Representatives of the company said that they demanded that Twitter remove the mark: «"BBC" has always been independent. We are funded by the people of the UK through license fees.»
One of the users' tweets about being flagged by the BBC was supplemented by a comment from the management of the social network that the license fee, «like any imposed state tax, was sanctioned by the state».
Twitter owner Elon Musk also commented on the tag in a replay: «Actually, I read the BBC myself.» “They have great materials.” «I don't count the BBC as biased as some other publicly funded publications, but stupid on the part of the BBC claim that [the government] has no influence on them,” he added in another tweet.
NPR, whose main account had 8.8 million subscribers, got the mark on April 5th. In response, the radio stopped publishing on this page. “NPR is independent of the US government, and <…> receives, on average, less than 1% of its annual budget from public sources,” the organization said.
Hi @ elonmusk.
The @BBC is not funded by the UK government.
It is funded by the British public through a system known as the license fee.
The BBC's operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government pic.twitter.com com/GvMpcSWIMe
— Jake Kanter (@Jake_Kanter) April 8, 2023
Twitter began leaving similar marks in 2020 for Russian and Chinese publications, government accounts and officials. Among them were Russia Today, RIA Novosti, TASS, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, Margarita Simonyan and Maria Zakharova.
After the start of the war in 2022, restrictions were imposed on such Russian accounts, but in April, Twitter again began to recommend them and give them out in the search.