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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

On a tangential note, it's bizarre how only certain twitter accounts are marked "state media" and all western media accounts (e.g. BBC) are left alone.

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Which ones are marked "state media"? AJE is not: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish

https://twitter.com/XHNews

I've seen individual Chinese accounts without any publicly known state affiliation marked as well.

Media in states that are on the permanent UN Security Council, that aren't Britain, France and the USA.

Twitter claims their rule includes them, but if Voice of America doesn't count as "state-affiliated media" then what would?

RT and Sputnik news have it. But not "voice of america" https://mobile.twitter.com/VOANews/status/129330694903191142...

Really? That's pretty weird on Twitter's part, cause I know Youtube marks VOA as state media.

I think youtube marks anything government affiliated. It marks CBC as gov owned and its run at a fair distance from the gov. Maybe twitter is trying to only mark media that is state mouth pieces, then again VoA is literally founded for propaganda purposes.

A French independent media got flagged as owned by Russia because of their covering of Russiagate from a different viewpoin.

Maybe there isn't any solid evidence (yet) that Ruptures is a Russian fake news outlet but when I poked around their site[1] for all of ten minutes it certainly seemed like it had the makings of one. So I can't say I blame twitter/their algorithm for flagging it as such. When I searched the names of their handful of journalists and editors many of them had made appearances in RT videos on YouTube and Facebook.

If it walks like a duck and all...

[1] For anyone curious: https://ruptures-presse.fr

> If it walks like a duck and all...

then CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and NYT should be marked as state media as well by that measure.

A lot of people make appearances on RT. Would you ask that if a website had most of their reporters have appearances at some point for the BBC? Would you ask for The Intercept to be classified as state sponsored media? How about the Daily Wire? How about Fox News, MSNBC, CNN?

You can't classify a media source as state sponsored simply because its editors agree with an alternative viewpoint. That is just ridiculous.

They should really be asked what is their precise criterion is for using the term "public broadcast service" instead, when it seems to simply be euphemism for the same thing.

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