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Comment by trasz3 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's not like their CEO came directly from the relevant government bureau, right?

I'm not a fan of Elon (or most companies, for that matter), but this was the right thing to do. Previously the "government-sponsored" badge was nothing more than US propaganda.

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There’s a bit of a “Pluto problem” [1] though with labeling NPR and not explicitly government supported media organizations like Voice of America. This suggests to me that the decision was based on some personal beef the owner has with NPR and not any kind of objective basis.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33462184 (warning: BBC is explicitly supported by the British Government)

Twitter have got the govenrment-funded label on VoA now. But not the BBC, curiously.

> some personal beef the owner has with NPR

NPR is a bogeyman of the American right-wing media, which Musk seems to be consuming an awful lot of in recent years.

The BBBC is funded by TV license fees so their funding is more arms length, also they make money through BBC Worldwide and collaborations with external media companies like HBO. As such they commonly shit on the government of the day, no matter who it is

I don't know how you'd apply measurement using the length of arms and conclude that BBC receives less money than NPR from the government. In any case, editorial influence is a lot more important, and that's where the BBC is falling down lately.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/15/the-gu...

> But not the BBC, curiously

You should check these things before posting. It says "Government-funded Media" right at the top of the page here: https://twitter.com/BBC

I shit you not: it did not an hour ago.

https://archive.ph/VJhTR recorded on 12 Apr 2023 07:43:40 UTC.

...and another hour later it says "Publicly funded media".

Someone is winging it.

It was there yesterday from what I recall. However, there are like 10 variant official accounts of BBC. Only one had the label at first. Similar to how NPR has multiple accounts but only the "main" one had the label. Twitter should be more consistent in labeling all accounts under a company if this is the new policy.

Twitter will be consistent when Elon Musk is no longer its owner.

>It says "Government-funded Media"...

It currently says "Publicly funded media", not "Government-funded Media", and that muddies the waters a bit - publicly-funded doesn't necessarily mean government-funded.

Not sure if it said "Gov-funded" an hour ago when you commented or not, as the other person who replied to you suggests that changes to these statements appear to be pretty fluid at the moment.

"Publicly funded media" seems like a decent way of characterizing NPR. At some point one might question what Twitter and its users are getting out of all this labeling and relabeling, though. How many users are going to have an I had no idea NPR was publicly funded media but now I know epiphany when encountering that label?

> Not sure if it said "Gov-funded" an hour ago when you commented or not

I am pretty sure all the observations made on labels in this thread were accurate at the moment they were made.

That is Musk's renaming of the "state affiliated" label originally applied to NPR, PBS, and the BBC.

Oh, definitely; it could be based on literally anything, or just effectively random. But it doesn't change my view of whether the outcome is positive or not.

SpaceX and Telsa are government funded ... More so than NPR. I don't see that tag anywhere on Twitter. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitter is combing the tax code to find government subsidies. It's the slippery slope fallacy. Maybe we should start calling jaywalkers un-convicted criminals. It'd be a good way to differentiate rural and urban people for political gain. This is just another way to keep people heading to twitter for some extra clicks.

Although, NPR was created by an act of Congress, along with the CPB.

and the AP was created by the Supreme Court, the AP is not a government entity.

Every large corporation benefits or has in the past benefited from the government. What difference does it make? Business profiles do marketing and advertising. They're not expected to report neutrally and fairly about current goings-on in society and politics. This is a ridiculous argument that has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

it is very frustrating to see this openly disingenuous argument made repeatedly here in these comments.

media corporations are different from other corporations in that their product is information, as opposed to other types of services or physical goods. information is something that can be biased, politically or otherwise. this does not apply to automobiles, spacecraft, or any other non-information-related product. the release of an electric automobile cannot influence anyone's view, opinion, or emotions, with regards to anything except the existence of said electric automobile.

The mismatch is that it's disingenuous to apply the label in the US, while not applying it to NBC, ABC, Fox, NYT, WaPo, Sinclair, etc. The US has a microkernel government where most actual power resides with corporations, with the same investors and executives owning the major news sources and shaping their coverage. Ironically, "government funded" NPR and PBS are in many ways actually more independent of the governing power structure. There's a similar blindspot where US culture readily condemns foreign governments with singular dominant parties, while letting our own two party oligopoly (in alignment on most policies) go essentially uncritiqued.

(full disclosure: I'm unable to listen to NPR without falling asleep. That's not meant to be some sort of knock, rather it's just what happens)

> The US has a microkernel government

Brilliant insight. Thank you.

He curiously missed Al Jazeera, RFE/RL, and the dozens of media organizations that the NED subsidizes. I don't think there's a conspiracy or anything, I just think he has a grudge against a handful of media companies.

They likely just haven't gotten around to all of them yet.

Except, of course, that NPR is not government-sponsored to any meaningful degree.

I wouldn't exactly call the USAGM the "relevant government bureau". Their purpose is to push US-biased news and media outside of the US. I see your point, and it's a bit iffy, but I'd rather judge on actions than reputation.

Interestingly, VOA, RFA etc. are not labeled state-affiliated media.

Edit: Actually VOA does have it now; I swear I checked just two days ago... Their various foreign language accounts still aren’t labeled though.

VOA is also labelled as "government funded", which implies less editorial control but personally sounds worse than affliated. The labelling is all over place.

they should add a "government-sponsored" badge to the spacex twitter account. and maybe even starlink and telsa (assuming they have government subsidies or their consumers are using tax credits to buy EV or rural internet)

Would be slick if all the space-company accounts had a couple lines of detail identifying what % of their total sales comes from government, military, commercial customers, etc.

Of course this would require people wanting to move away from “how can I tarnish this account with a label?” and toward “how can I improve transparency without aiming to insult?”

As others have noted already, their actions don't match their own rules so this is, again, just Musk being an angry manbaby.

It's always a bit strange when someone says they're not a fan of Elon and then proceed to give him an absurd level of benefit of the doubt by just eliding all the obvious facts that what he's doing is ridiculous and bad.

Government-sponsored was not a US propaganda badge, it was a response to a serious concern about adversarial governments influencing US debate through 3rd party cut outs. It's a difficult problem to solve but the previous employees made a good faith effort to come up with a definition and then enforce it. Musk, however, didn't do that. He took an official label with a definition that Twitter publicly discloses and applied it to a news organization he personally doesn't like despite it being completely inaccurate.

If what you're arguing, is that the label was bad, and badly or unevenly enforced what Musk has done is made it worse - not better. There's now no consistent definition, all the old organisations that were tagged are still tagged, and he's driven a bus through twitter's credibility.

Even if you accept that there was a genuine problem with the way the previous system was designed, there's simply no way to argue that Musk has improved it. And to be clear - the previous system was exactly what Musk claimed he wanted for twitter - a clear open definition you could point to, and labelling accounts rather than banning them in order to maximize free speech, if this system weren't in place before it is almost certain Musk would've loved it if a right wing bigot twitter user suggested it.

What you actually seem to be arguing is "Something should have been done, this was a thing, therefore this was the right thing to do".

>Government-sponsored was not a US propaganda badge, it was a response to a serious concern about adversarial governments

For most people USA is an adversarial government. You've just confirmed it was a propaganda badge meaning "unamerican".

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