https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-controller-hails-...
Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding?
It's hard to see this as anything but silly politics games.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-hol...
How much of X is now owned by Saudi Arabia is the real question.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-no-longe...
In other words..the Saudi you are referencing was a large shareholder of the “Old Twitter”.
That’s along the lines of “how much did Russia fund Facebook”
VTB (sanctioned bank) funded Facebook in the tune of $1bn. It also funded Twitter in 2011 for $191m.
If NPR's government contributions are embarrassing for the organisation, it might be best for them to forgo that funding. Additionally, if there's no influence/bias, then why does it matter that their funding is disclosed to the reader?
Connotation is just as important as denotation when evaluating meaning and accuracy of statements. Engineers love to pretend otherwise - that's probably part of why we're engineers - but that doesn't make them right.
But I believe the label is more important than what some people fear other people would maybe perceive.
> Funding for NPR comes from [...other sources...] and annual grants from the publicly-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Hmm, let's look into said Corporation:
> On February 26, 1970, the CPB formed National Public Radio (NPR)
> The CPB's annual budget is composed almost entirely of an annual appropriation from Congress plus interest on those funds.
> The CPB is governed by a nine-member board of directors selected by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate
I mean... If this wasn't "state-affiliated media" at its inception, I'm not entirely sure what is.
NPR show Frontline is a great place to start this education.
Attempting to place NPR and that kind of sentiment in the same conversation as anything other than a great example of how Gov't funds can be provided without such _control_ is disingenuous at best.
NPR != RT
Musk is in way over his head.
A large part of their funding comes from congress -> corporation for public broadcasting -> local NPR affiliates -> NPR.
It is indirect funding, yes, but they are very much funded by the US government.
Quoting https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
> On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.
In reality government funding accounts for much more than 1% of NPR's budget.
NPR itself [1] says that figure is 13 percent, counting state governments. In either case, I am comfortable that NPR is editorially independent but also comfortable saying that without government money, it's a podcast network.
The power of the purse is the power to pull strings even if that power is not currently being used, and even if the marionette would scream really loudly if the strings were pulled. I don't think "state-affiliated" was a fair label. "Government-funded" was, and NPR is damaging its credibility more than Twitter could by pitching a fit over it.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...
"it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best"
"closely associated with another typically in a dependent or subordinate position"
"an organization that is officially connected with or controlled by another, usually larger, organization"
dependent: "relying on another for support" (also uses of the words "need" and "requires")
I would agree with parent comment - NPR is not directly, closely affiliated with the state. And isn't in a subordinate position with the state. It has about 12% of its funding from tax dollars, but I think it'd likely exists without that.
I also agree with parent comment they are state funded, however, and anyone who had 12% of their income from a given source for free and no work would be biased and influenced to be friendly towards them. To suggest that the people who work at and run NPR are free from bias and influence is demonstrably not true, and so it also follows we can't assume they would approach their funding without bias.
Is the criteria money? coercion? backdoor-deals? bias?
As per Twitter’s criteria, it’s money.
Control/Coercion seem more important, especially since Twitter has a separate category for media with government funding. (cf https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia... for both)
Twitter: “Financial Resource” Considering we do have a law around funding NPR and the company would be impacted of that funding went away, personally I see it as appropriate.
However, I also see it appropriate that Fox News and Washington Post get the same tag. (party political pressures)
Does the Whitehouse (in general) use press access passes as bartering chip, yes of course!
With that said, “state-affiliated” depends on criteria. Whether it’s agreed upon or not, Twitter set their criteria. Other outlets set their criteria as well…on news, politics, health, and illicit.
It receives DIRECT funding from the United States government.
Twitter was generous in changing the label from "State-affiliated" media (given that it was literally created by the US Government) to "Government-funded media".
There is no possible argument against the "Government-funded media" label that makes sense. They're government funded. NPR's parent company, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is also government funded. Neither of these funding points are debatable (aka Full stop).
When NPR runs their "ADM Supermarket to the World" spots, that is telling you who is really funding them and who to worry about exerting editorial control.
In fact there are still some families in Canada with noble titles, hearldry, etc., who are indeed affiliated with the Crown.
Your (and Elons) argument has shades of the famous ‘with us or against us’ line. Details matter.
I do agree social media companies should be categorized as a publisher - or content providers, but they are not. I think changing section 230 would solve a lot of problems by removing very specific legal protections, which news companies do not receive, and help prevent clear issues such as knowingly promoting false information.
There are those that disagree with me. Problems exist with any solution such as who should judge what should not be allowed and would the counter devolve into an organization that could control information dissemination? A valid point. I think the answer is already out there - a very low standard (or to say another way the high burden of proof required) current news organizations are held to by law, which most seem not to debate is too restrictive, or some line between nothing and that.
There is a lot of academic discourse on this topic and I recommend researching 230 more. It’s a fascinating policy debate with pros and cons on both sides. It was written in 1996, the year the palm pilot and the Pentium 166MHz processor was introduced.
This in itself should be enough to remove media organisation protections.
Ah, yes, the old "if I misrepresent the issue and assign a negative emotion to it, other people will see it as bad" trope. That's fun.
Do you have any evidence they find the contributions "embarrassing" as opposed to finding the label an intentionally-misleading dog whistle? Or is that not something that occurred to you?
This seems super far from what twitter is. Please explicitly explain how an AP story is in regards to twitter.
Twitter is a publisher, though (because of Section 230) they are not liable as a publisher for most of what they publish under US law.
Making NPR display its funding sources for all to see is a good thing (although "state-affiliated" was not the right label). Not making other high profile accounts do the same is pure hypocrisy.
> It's a distraction.
Categorizing an argument doesn't provide justification for that categorization.
This is not some conspiracy theory. It was very much out in the open.
Even more recently, the house speaker gave Fox preferred access to the Jan 6th video.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Maybe it needs a "NewsCorp/Murdoch affiliated" label.
Twitter is a media company, a publisher with an editorial voice that we have to assume is independent from the Saudi government or any government funding the owner's other businesses.
That doesn't mean Twitter shouldn't correctly label state funded media.
thats not to say theyre evacuating to another platform, just that 'no platform' is a safer option than twitter platform.
[1] https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151
Your "rather have no platform than that platform" resonates with me.
It would better if we had some way to follow the large number of valid sources of information from diverse variety of online sources within one application. Whether that ends up being Twitter, or some Federated system, I would prefer that it does not come under or remain under the control of a capricious overlord.
I absolutely understand the frustration of people who are on Twitter just to do the business of journalism, cause it does not seem like a place that is all that conducive to the market for journalism or other writing. It seems more like a public-access text-based cable-news-outrage outlet these days.
Whatever happens, someone please let me know where all the people working on AI end up, cause that's something I would like to follow without all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that happens on Twitter.
I suppose that’s PR, although I eventually switched to engineering.
My first thought. How much in easy loans have his companies received from the government?
This is just rich people hating on the industry that publicly critiques them.
2. If by "easy loans" you mean competing for contracts with the likes of BlueOrigin, Raytheon and Boeing, you ought to drop the word 'easy'
3. If the goal is getting back at the industry, one questions whether Elon Musk wouldn't have had an easier time just buying up a bunch of the papers like Bezos and Murdoch
4. Unlike the previous Twitter regime, Musk allows organisations free reign to critique anyone and anything they like. They just have to disclose who's paying for the criticism is all :)
That's why you were not allowed to like or retweet posts that linked to substack, right?
It's so tiring having to rehash this in every conversation about Twitter, so… please, let's just acknowledge that Elon doesn't care about free speech and move on with our lives.
2) No, this is not what I meant. I meant easy loan terms, otherwise they would have just gone after less competitive loans in the open market.
3) Ask Elon? He gets to kill multiple birds with one Twitter purchase. Something Bezos can't do.
4) There's a distinction between "paying for something" and "paying someone who does something", and that distinction is editorial control. Ask artists and writers who sell works for hire by specification. And tell it to those who have had their accounts locked, even under Musk's ownership.
What I did find is that Mike Griffin, the aerospace engineer who became the top NASA administrator in 2005, had a previous job as president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture-capital fund for national security tech.
He invested $500 million in commercial space, eventually $396 million eventually going to SpaceX, along with $454 million of outside capital and $100 million of Musk's own money in 2006. [0]
So, if there is in In-Q-Tel investment, it is logged behind the Crunchbase paywall. That said, In-Q-Tel is an excellent idea to produce better home-grown security technology, and I have no problem with it (not even with their publicized investment in Facebook, and I consider FB a plague on humanity — that's more of a slur on In-Q-Tel than In-Q-Tel is on FB).
[0] https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-...
Are they a "media" company primarily dedicated to the practice of journalism?
I think the "state affiliated media" could be applied to Twitter by the same standards, but for Tesla & SpaceX, just "state affiliated"
as for whether it's a media company, that's irrelevant and seems to be an attempt to move the goalposts
All companies have PR departments (except, of course, Twitter, which only responds with poop emoji.)
Company PR departments generally report on the company and things which directly affect the company. They issue press releases and they comment on litigation and they celebrate anniversaries.
Journalism organizations and public information outlets don't merely report on themselves, they report on the world, or topics of interest to their advertisers or donors or governments or supporters. Therefore there's a wider range and there's a third-party nature to it. Journalists may be investigative, or sometimes they may just regurgitate press releases from various companies. From wide ranges of different types of various companies. Even if a news outlet reports only on dentistry, there's still a wide range of dental topics that are covered, not just Colgate and their toothpaste.
So I agree; NPR should be properly labeled according to the government which supports them. So should PBS, right? There's no shame in that. Why don't Facebook and Google do it too? YouTube regularly slaps a label on government mouthpieces that I tune into there. It's important to be even-handed and label the Chinese and Russians the same as the Venezuelans and Germans and Irish and Catholics and Orthodox the same as the United States.
folks reading posts by Tesla and SpaceX should know that aside from elmu's history of disingenuousness and outright lying, such posts are even more likely to be pro-government biased than NPR
so I agree: SpaceX and Tesla should be labeled according to the government which supports them, there's no shame in that.
Why would SpaceX need a label? “Warning: this rocket fuel is affiliated with the US government so maybe don’t trust it’s opinion on open flames”
An org that primarily sells media (PBS or Twitter) should live by what its primary revenue source is for that media, because it colors the media that goes out the door.
Further, are the bulk of twitter's profits derived from concessions on a lease ? I don't think so, but I'm open minded.
An org that does not sell media, but physical goods (i.e. Tesla) is arguably selling cars, not media.
Are SpaceX or Tesla news organizations?
EDIT: lots of discussion around this. Twitter is literally a social media company. You can split hairs on whether the “media” part of “social media” agrees with your bias here.
Tech companies: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter.
Some companies are even both. But in the main, Twitter is the thing that employs developers and writes code and not the thing that employs reporters and writes stories.
Here we go again...under this view, every company is a "tech" company. Does GE or John Deere write software for their hardware? Absolutely. Are they colloquially considered "tech" companies? No.
Twitter is a media company (they distribute media). Tech is their operating model to deliver media. As is Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. etc.
Because tech is not their primary line of business.
> Twitter is a media company (they distribute media).
A media company is the thing that produces media, not the thing that distributes it. Cogent is not a media company.
Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
So you're conceding that Twitter isn't the entity generating the content.
> Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
By your analogy, John Deere is a food company, because people aren't there for the tractors, they're there for the harvested crops. But that doesn't work because John Deere and Conagra are not the same kind of operation.
Deere's customers are there for the tech. They're handing over money for it.
Twitter's customers are there for the audience. The audience is there for... the rest of the audience. Their tech is entirely incidental to their value. Calling twitter a tech company is like calling Deere a factory company—one uses tech and one uses factories, but that's not what they are.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not saying we should call John Deere a tech company—I don't think it's the best label, even as a very broad one, for what they do—but I do think Twitter is so not one that it'd make more sense to call Deere a tech company than Twitter.
John Deere designs their own tractors. Their customers want tractors. They could outsource the manufacturing and still sell to the same customers.
Foxconn is a factory company. The thing people want from them is manufacturing. Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple. If they had no factories they would have no business.
Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates. Their users want to talk to each other, in the same way as John Deere's customers want harvested crops. But the way Twitter provides that service is through computers and software.
Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Are new users (or actual customers—advertisers, blue-checks these days, which, LOL) signing up because they want access to the technology?
If another company cloned 100% of Twitter's proprietary technology, perfectly, how would investors react to that company, if that's all they've got?
If that company offered that tech for sale, outright, straight-up IP transfer, a single bidder owns the whole thing, what percentage of Twitter's value would that tech command on the market?
I'd go with:
1) No,
2) No,
3) They'd practically ignore it,
and 4) probably not even 1%
Twitter could completely outsource their software development and still sell advertising to its customers.
> Foxconn is a factory company.
Wtf does this even mean? Foxconn is a semiconductor manufacturer...
> Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple.
Oh great, so Apple isn't a tech company anymore? Don't they write code that powers the back-end of virtually every iPhone in existence (backup, iCloud, iMessage, App Store, etc. etc.).
> Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates.
So how do you explain all of the sales people? Or the content regulation? Or the support? fun fact - when it was publicly traded Twitter spent nearly equally on R&D as it did S&M.
> Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Because this is OUTSOURCED. It's user generated content.
Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech". Microsoft as an example is heavily diversified and as a software publisher they sell ERP software, operating system software, business productivity software, etc. Technology is what allows them to produce and run that software.
> A media company is the thing that produces media
"Tech" is a fairly broad category that includes both computer hardware and computer software, but these are definitely things that companies produce and sell for money, or produce and offer as services.
But why are we talking about what counts as a tech company when the issue is what counts as a media company? If Microsoft was a "Cloud Services" instead of a "tech" company, Azure still wouldn't be a media entity.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media#Internet
The internet, like broadcast television and cable, is a medium of transmission. But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC, not Panasonic.
No it doesn't. That's my point. Tech isn't an industry or a category. It's an operating model. The delineation of it being an industry adds nothing of value to any discussion because its so ill-defined.
> But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC
Guess what...NBC merged with Comcast and Comcast is a telecomm company, which guess what...distributes media.
> Panasonic.
Panasonic is a hardware manufacturer...
Alice is a lawyer and Bob is a doctor and a lawyer. Why would that imply that Alice is a doctor?
> Panasonic is a hardware manufacturer...
And Twitter is a communications service.
They're not in the same line of business as the entities that employ reporters.
Ok so they're not a tech company. Glad we solved that. /handshake-emoji/
It’s a mess of a company for sure, but just because their software isn’t common on the web, I’d still classify them as a tech company.
I think of Twitter as a media outlet. They don’t directly employ news writers, but just about all media flows through Twitter in some form or fashion. They’re intrinsically linked to the media landscape.
I do, because the definition is so loose that it gets manipulated by investors / the overall market. Great example:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-cogan-8627b955_dtc-stockm...
And it makes sense for the label to be applied specifically to media entities because journalists are supposed to be unbiased, as opposed to e.g. Raytheon which is objectively state-affiliated but nobody expects to be doing objective reporting.
If a media outlet is being funded by the government then readers should know that because it could affect their coverage if they fear losing that funding as a result of critical reporting. This directly applies to NPR because Republicans regularly threaten to remove its public funding in response to their coverage.
The better criticism is, why is the label applied to NPR but not e.g. MSNBC? Pretty sure at least Comcast (MSNBC's parent company) receives a significant amount of government funding.
close, if there is evidence their coverage is actually being affected, readers should know that because that is what should inform their decision
in some cases, where the funding constitutes a large portion of total funding, it may be appropriate to add a disclaimer
Meanwhile case-specific evidence is largely unavailable. Reporters would be loathe to admit to being cowed, but are also aware that corporate executives make decisions on things like promotions and timeslots based on the bottom line, or in less well-funded entities that a loss of funding can directly lead to a loss of employment.
How about statistical evidence? Well, if Republicans are threatening NPR with the loss of funding, they could slant their coverage to placate the legislators criticizing them, or they could slant it the other way to bolster their support from the other party. In either case it compromises their neutrality, but now you can find "evidence" of this in any divergence from neutrality in either direction. Since they couldn't reasonably be expected to be infallible in the alternative, that doesn't prove anything.
So you make people aware of the incentive, because that's all you're really going to know about in practice.
an example of evidence of such a conspiracy theory would be internal emails telling a reporter to go easy on the US government because a small portion of funding comes from it, or to attack X because the US government wants them to
statistical evidence would work too if it proves the claims of bias somehow, I leave it to you to figure out some examples
Ad Fontes tries to rate news media on the type of reporting it does and the general political skew. This doesn't capture everything, but it can be done. Except for specific topics I think it's slightly better than incentives in general, though incentives are important too.
And social media companies are more like convenience stores that also carry newspapers. The large majority of tweets are not by media outlets.
This has never been the case. Never. While some journalism sources operate in a facts-only manner, all journalistic sources have bias as to which stories they research. And historically, the press has been about propaganda, editorials, and selling papers at least as much as about reporting.
Labeling news organization as "government-funded" is less informative than labeling them as "propaganda" or "editorializing". The major reason to so label them is, itself, propaganda. With the second reason being a warning to the reader to practice even more diligence than normal.
By your own reasoning, those other labels would be redundant. Whereas "government-affiliated" makes the reader aware of a specific kind of bias that not all media entities are subject to.
Clair Cameron Patterson famously took money from the leaded gasoline industry to help fund his research demonstrating the harms of leaded gasoline.
They aren't trying to hide it.
The NASA contracts are very much public.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
To say that NPR doesn’t receive a significant portion of its budget from the federal government is a lie. This same argument is made whenever a politico mentions cutting funding to NPR. There is a large push to claim that NPR receives very little funding and it’s irrelevant to the network.
But you can’t have it both ways. The lady doth protest too mightily.
Since you failed to keeps scrolling down, here's the link to the "local station revenues" section
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
5% from Federal and state and local governments.
Another 8% comes from CPB, which is a federally funded, private non-profit. The vast majority of CPB's funding goes towards public television, not public radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...
So yes, actually.
> In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities.[34][63] While NPR does not receive any direct federal funding, it does receive a small number of competitive grants from CPB and federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Department of Commerce.[34] This funding amounts amounted to less than 0.1% of revenues, according to its 2020 public filings.
I'm not from the US so don't know the politics of this discussion, but it seems like NPR is funded more by the public directly, as well as the public sphere (foundations, universities, etc) than by the public sector. Do you have a source to the contrary?
Do you have any evidence of this? Less than 1% of NPR's funding comes from federal sources, according to wikipedia.
To get the correct figure, you need to add together not just federal money for NPR but also state government money, and federal and state money for its affiliates and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR only functions in an ecosystem, and the total figure for that ecosystem is at least 14 percent according to... NPR [1]. I suspect the real figure is somewhat obscured because some of their non-government donors will get some of their money from the government(s). I do not think the public media ecosystem would exist with 14 percent less money, but I could be wrong.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...
> It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“Public Broadcasters Fear ‘Collapse’ if U.S. Drops Support,” announced a New York Times headline in March of 2017. Michael Grynbaum and Ben Sisario reported for the Times:
Public radio and television broadcasters are girding for battle after the Trump administration proposed a drastic cutback that they have long dreaded: the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The potential elimination of about $445 million in annual funding, which helps local TV and radio stations subscribe to NPR and Public Broadcasting Service programming, could be devastating for affiliates in smaller markets that already operate on a shoestring budget.
It's just as disingenuous to say NPR is directly funded by the Federal government as it is to say NPR receives little money from the Federal Government since it gets a lot of money from CPB which actually gets money from Congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...
"There is no undisputed definition of state media or government media. The most common definition of state media or government media refers to any media organization that is either directly or indirectly owned or operated by the state.[4]"
"...State or government media can range from media outlets that are completely under state control to editorially independent public service media outlets.[1] The term "public media" can be used to refer to state or government media and public service broadcasting (PBS). Although there are differences between them. According to the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, state and government media are directly controlled by the state or government; and PBS are not.[7] According to Facebook, state-controlled media are "partially or wholly under the editorial control of a government".[8]"
Interestingly:
"Twitter uses the term "state-affiliated media" and defines it as "outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution." At the same time, "state-financed" editorially independent media are not considered "state-affiliated".[9][10]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Electoral_Knowledge_Networ...
"The goal of the ACE network is to provide knowledge to people working in the field elections, with the intention of supporting credible and transparent electoral processes with emphasis on sustainability, professionalism and trust. "