It’s all change at Twitter at the moment. After CEO Elon Musk celebrated 4/20 by purging the platform of “legacy blue checks,” it now appears that “government-funded” labels applied to media organizations have also disappeared as of Friday morning. Outlets including NPR and Canada’s CBC—which expressed outrage when the description was first applied to their accounts—are no longer marked with the label. The BBC, which had been slapped with a “publicly funded” label, is also now unlabeled.
Even accounts for China’s Xinhua News and Russia’s RT no longer appear to be labeled—a move welcomed by Tiananmen-protester-turned-Beijing-propagandist Hu Xijin, a commentator with the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper. “I support Twitter’s removal of all ‘State-affiliated media’ labels,” Hu wrote in a tweet that was later deleted. Read more.
