Twitter drops ‘government-funded media’ labels after open letter protest

Twitter has dropped labels designating some public media outlets as “government-funded media,” their profiles showed Friday.

The move comes a day after an international alliance of broadcasters published an open letter calling on the Elon Musk-owned platform to correct the erroneous classification.

“This misleading label was applied without warning or consultation to the accounts of four organizations: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), CBC/Radio-Canada, Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Radio New Zealand (RNZ),” the Global Task Force said in a statement Friday.

The organization, which “exists to promote and defend the values of public media,” said the classification of the four broadcasters as “government-funded media” is contrary to Twitter’s own policy.

The company defines such organizations “as cases where the government ‘may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content,’” GTF wrote — “which is clearly not the case.”

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it appears the labels were also removed from public media outlets in the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden.

NPR, which recently announced it would stop using the platform over the misleading labeling, also saw the label disappear from its page on Friday.

The same happened with the BBC and the Swedish public radio — which announced it was quitting the microblogging platform earlier this week.

On Thursday, the troubled social media platform, which was acquired by the South African-born billionaire in October of last year, started removing legacy verified checkmarks — the now-infamous blue tick — from non-paying subscribers.

The list of unverified Twitter accounts includes Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, the New York Daily News and Sesame Street legend Elmo, who tweeted, “Elmo will miss you, little blue check mark. But don’t worry everybody, Elmo is still Elmo!”