Swedish Radio said on Tuesday that it was leaving Twitter. It is the first big European public broadcaster to leave the social media site, joining three from North America that have done so in the past week.
Swedish Radio said it made the decision because Twitter was no longer useful for a Swedish audience, not because Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, has made it a policy to call more public broadcasters “government funded.”
“The crowd has just chosen to be somewhere else. “Because of this, Sveriges Radio has decided to shut down or delete the last remaining accounts,” Christian Gillinger, head of social media at Swedish Radio, said in a blog post.
This week, U.S. broadcasters NPR and PBS, as well as Canada’s CBC, left Twitter because the social media site added new marks to their accounts that said they were “government-funded media.”
So far, this change seems to have happened in North America but not in Western Europe, where Swedish Radio, the BBC, and other stations are still called “publicly funded.” Dillinger said that Swedish Radio had no problem with its name. “Based on the current definition, it’s a correct description of how Swedish Radio is funded,” he said.
Major Western broadcasters say that there is a clear difference between public-funded stations with independent editing policies and government-run stations.
Swedish Radio Has Been on Twitter Since 2009
In 2021, 7.4 million people will listen to Swedish Radio every week. It said that Swedes were less interested in Twitter. It said that a study showed that only 7% of Swedes used Twitter every day, while 53% used Facebook and 48% used Instagram.
The tweet below confirms the news:
#BreakingNews: Swedish public broadcaster “Sveriges Radio” (SR) has decided to stop using Twitter as part of its social media strategy, citing concerns over "recent turbulence" at the company surrounding its ability to fight fake news and hate speech ‼️
Seriously @sverigesradio… pic.twitter.com/6DcUzBbkdX
— ILONSISHOP (@ILONSI_SHOP) April 18, 2023
Dillinger said that most accounts would be removed and others would be marked as inactive. The reporters who work for Swedish Radio can still use Twitter however they want.
He said, however, that it was worrying that Twitter had cut its staff and that this could hurt Twitter’s ability to deal with bots, fake news, and hateful material.
“Of course, all of these things are taken into account when we decide to stop editing on the platform,” he said.
Under Musk, Twitter no longer has a press office where people can ask for comments.
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