Musk is the threat to free speech that the right wing warned you about.
2) If NPR receives government funding, isn't calling them state affiliated at least in the ballpark of reasonable labels?
3) Personally, I think the labels themselves should probably change. Rather than calling media entities state-affiliated, maybe Twitter could link to whatever public data is available about each media outlet's funding source. Rather than seeing "state affiliated", maybe people should see the percentage of funding a media outlet gets from government sources. If NPR gets ~4% of their funding from government sources, maybe adding that figure in as the label is fine. If RussiaToday gets X% of their funding from the Russian government, knowing that is helpful to assess their posts too.
Funding seems like a problematic metric for this. While it highlights an interesting factoid, funding does not necessarily correlate to editorial control. That information also isn't reliably available for all state broadcasters. And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone.
I'm not seeing that. Funding is as close to an objective measurement of control as you could ever come up with.
A media entity can of course be biased towards a government, whether or not they get anywhere from 0 to 100% of their funding from the government, but the likelihood of government bias almost certainly increases with more funding.
If you see 99% of media outlets with < 1% of government funding, but then there's a few outlets with a large percentage of government funding, that's important information for weighing their journalism.
> And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone.
Honestly, I think this is a jaw-droppingly phenomenal idea. Everybody is a political actor on Twitter, and I'm sure SpaceX and other corporations make tweets that are directly or indirectly weighing in on political and other issues that are relevant to them. Knowing that they have a dog in a particular fight is really important for weighing their tweets fairly.
Isn't that helpful context for deciding how likely it is that certain news stories are possibly biased or not?
And most of the print media is constantly eviscerating the PM, which would be an odd act of they cared which side if the bread was buttered.
I just saw this: Elon Musk's new Twitter: a "verified" account that was previously suspended for spreading disinformation about the Bucha Massacre now spreading completely fictional quotes from Volodymyr Zelenskyy with over a thousand retweets and nearly 300,000 views.
https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1644048712753356800
Elon Musk is the new Rupert Murdoch, a menace to free societies
Musk’s Twitter Buy Makes No Sense – Unless It’s Part of Something Bigger. Brexit and Trump were initially seen as jokes, but the new owner of the social media giant could pose a serious threat to democracy – and a boon for Vladimir Putin
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/11/07/musks-twitter-buy-makes-n...
It's hard to understand Elon's politics without considering libertarianism, singularitism, technocracy, demagoguery, and populism.