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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

> citing the social media platform's decision to label NPR "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.

it's indeed a shame they do it for chinese and russian companies, but not the BBC or western european broadcasters...

hell, not even Radio Free Europe is marked as "state-affiliated media". If not them, who?

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Twitter themselves had a guide that explained why NPR and BBC were not labelled as such, which has been revised since, but is still archived.

"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...

> Twitter themselves had a guide that explained why NPR and BBC were not labelled as such

> "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

That explains the what, not the why. It says they aren't going to consider BBC and NPR as state-affiliated, but not why they aren't going to consider them as state-affiliated. "Editorial independence" is a meaningless superlative that cannot be empirically measured through any means available to twitter.

The "why" is because the "state affiliated" label was meant to be innuendo for "untrustworthy" and twitter, under previous management, did not consider NPR and BBC untrustworthy.

I think it explains the why quite clearly- editorial independence. It's a big deal. NPR is allowed to be critical of the US government in a way that RT is not.

Have you ever considered the possible difference between what's officially allowed and what's actually happening?

Nowadays, when information is abundant, individual stories don't matter all that much; what does matter is building the overall narrative. Allowing critical stories doesn't affect that.

Dear guy who brags about ban evasion in his profile on his 3-month old account: thanks for getting me to check if HN had a block button.

So, does it? xD

I think you should toss this link in your bio so people can see why dang banned you twice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018795

And look how effective that was.

I agree that it was ineffective, that's why I think you should put that link in your bio- I don't think nearly as many people would waste much time talking to you if they were just linked to why you were banned instead of only seeing your biased version of it.

but this opens the can of worm of defining "editorial independence". and I think that speaking of State-financed or Publicly-financed is a better.

Sure. But then can we label SpaceX and Tesla as State-Financed? They are both sucking down way more money from the US Gov't than NPR is.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...

omg yes, between banks bailouts, law mandated insurances, private-pensions plans and companies with a huge public contribution (such as SpaceX); it would finally open the eyes to the public how much of "capitalism" is in fact politically created and directed.

So yes, I really would like to see this.

Agreed! I also would love to see the flip-side and have congressional reps wear logos like in NASCAR. Let's be real fucking clear how many are solidly in the pocket of their corporate "donors".

Editorial independence in action: https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/management-team/john-lansin...

you are asserting that having ever worked with the government necessarily means that you are silently, privately doing their editorial bidding on their behalf and I do not think that is reasonable or appropriate

There's a subtle difference between "working with" and being the CEO.

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