Twitter Removes “Government Funded” From The Profiles Of News Outlets…. While It Appears To Require Advertisers To Have Gold Checkmarks…. Along With #BlockTheBlue Becoming A Thing
So it looks like Elon has backed down from slapping the phrase “Government Funded” onto any media that gets money from a government entity. I am guessing that the blowback became too much for him to deal with, and that forced him to do one of his famous U-turns. But there’s a catch:
Twitter has removed labels describing global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated, a move that comes after the Elon Musk-owned platform started stripping blue verification checkmarks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee.
Among those no longer labeled was National Public Radio in the U.S., which announced last week that it would stop using Twitter after its main account was designated state-affiliated media, a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China.
Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — said it was still misleading.
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Swedish public radio made similar decisions to quit tweeting. CBC’s government-funded label vanished Friday, along with the state-affiliated tags on media accounts including Sputnik and RT in Russia and Xinhua in China.
So, Twitter has removed these labels for news outlets, including those under authoritarian control in China, Iran and Russia. Let’s think about that for a second. If I were CBC or Swedish Public Radio or any other broadcaster, I would not return to Twitter under these circumstances because this isn’t an improvement and Elon continues to muddy the waters here
If that wasn’t enough, it seems Elon is up to something with advertisers. And it appears to be part of the purge of legacy verification checkmarks that happened yesterday:
Elon must be smoking some serious drugs to have come up with this rather ludicrous scheme and think it would fly with advertisers. Because if I were an advertiser and I got this email, and I was on the fence as to whether I would I should continue to advertise on Twitter, I’d say “Hell no! I’m done with Twitter.” I’ll take bets now as to how long it will take Elon to do a U-turn on this policy when it doesn’t work as all this policy is going to do is drive more advertisers off of Twitter.
Finally, since we’re speaking of the great purge of legacy verification checkmarks that happened yesterday, there’s some serious trolling of that going on:
What Elon doesn’t get is that getting a checkmark via Twitter Blue isn’t a status symbol. It represents the fact that you paid for attention and Elon has devalued the blue checkmark. In fact there’s a hashtag on Twitter called #BlockTheBlue where people who pay Elon $8 a month ($11 on iOS) to get a blue checkmark get blocked by those who haven’t paid Elon. Why?
Thus it looks like this is another example of one of Elon’s ideas blowing up in his face. Because after all, he’s not that smart and doesn’t think things through before doing something. Which leads him to having situations like these where he looks like a total loser.
It truly sucks to be Elon!
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