Here's another storm in a teacup (or "storm in a tea-kettle" as North Americans would have it, which makes no sense at all to me), brewed up by the great minds at Pierre Poilievre's Conservative policy headquarters.
Poilievre called on his buddy Elon Musk to have Twitter flag the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as "government-funded media". Well, you might think, that's not a big deal. The CBC IS funded by the government, to the tune of over $1 billion a year (or nearly 70% of its revenue). The government funds all sorts of worthy causes and arts endeavours; it's what governments do, and what governments of all political stripes have done since its inception.
Poilievre's intention, though, is to brand the CBC - which he hates with a passion, and which he has vowed to defund if Canada is ever so unwise as to make him Prime Minister - as a mouthpiece of Liberal, and even more specifically Trudeau, views. He has been very up-front about these opinions, publicly calling the CBC "a biased propaganda arm of the Liberal Party". This is largely because the CBC, along with other independent media outlets, has had the temerity to call out some of his, Poilievre's, more off-the-wall statements and beliefs. He does not deal well with criticism.
Poilievre thinks that his sneaky piece of populist activism has already had an impact. "Now people know that it is Trudeau propaganda, not news", he sneers, as though a label on an increasingly inconsequential social media makes all the difference. The CBC has proved just how inconsequential Twitter is by voluntarily suspending its Twitter account (as has PBS and NPR in the USA, and some other august media platforms).
"Government-funded media", according to Twitter, is defined as "outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet's funding, and may have varying degrees of government over editorial content". It tries to give a similar impression as its "state-affiliated media" label. The CBC may well be funded by the government of the day, but it is operated at arm's length from the government, and its editorial independence is enshrined in law in the Broadcasting Act.
Now, whatever you might think about the effrontery of a billionaire-owned social media company making these kinds of value judgements, in an attempt to colour the perceptions of its users and undermine the credibility of critical news outlets, this particular ruling seems transparently political and ill-advised.
Twitter recently tried to do the same with the esteemed BBC, before backtracking and changing its label to "publicly-funded media", and NPR was branded as state-affiliated media" before being toned down to "government-funded media" (and before NPR suspended its Twitter account). These are childish political games by Musk maybe, but with real world implications. Certainly, childish political games by Poilievre, also with important real world implications.
If Twitter (and Elon Musk) continue making poor decisions, one can only hope that it will paint itself into a corner and become increasingly irrelevant, other than as an echo chamber for those on the far right. Arguably, this process has already started. I extend this hope to Pierre Poilievre.
UPDATE
A few days later, in the kind of random flip-flop we have come to expect from Elon Musk, the "government-funded media" labels on the accounts of CBC, BBC and NPR, were quietly removed by Twitter. I guess Musk thinks that their anti-liberal effect has been achieved, and they are no longer needed? I do believe this is all a big game for Musk.
At the same time, a bunch of other labels were deleted from Iranian, Chinese and Russian outlets that actually ARE government-funded and government-influenced, like Russia Today, China's CCTV and Xinhua News. *Sigh*
Media requests to Twitter for explanations on these developments met with its new automated poop emoji, just another indication of how serious Mr. Musk is.
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