Swedish Radio Becomes First Big European Broadcaster to Quit Twitter

 

Image Credit: Google

STOCKHOLM, April 18: Another quit at Twitter, Swedish Radio announced its on Tuesday about its decision to quit Twitter. It is the first major European public broadcasting agency who have joined the move to abandon this social media platform started in earlier this month.  

Swedish Radio softly announced that it is leaving because Twitter loses its relevance for a Swedish audience instead of blaming Twitter’s new policy under the Elon Musk.

"The audience has simply chosen other places to be. And therefore Sveriges Radio now chooses to deactivate or delete the last remaining accounts," Christian Gillinger, who is the head of Social Media at Swedish Radio, said in a blog post.

U.S. broadcasters NPR and PBS and Canada's CBC quit Twitter in the previous week after the Twitter added new labels to their accounts terming them "government-funded media".

However, the change made so far appears to have been applied in North America but not in Western Europe, where Swedish Radio, Britain's BBC and others are instead labeled "publicly-funded".

Gillinger added that “Swedish Radio had no problem with its designation: Based on the current definition, it's a correct description of how Swedish Radio is financed."

Furthermore, majority of Western broadcasters put their argument in the debate that there is a clear difference between those who receive public funding but are editorially independent, and those which are run by governments.

If we go for the statistics, Sveriges Radio had 7.4 million weekly listeners in 2021 only, while this had been on Twitter since 2009. It said Swedish people’s interest in Twitter had reduced to greater extent, citing a report that showed only 7% of Swedes used Twitter daily, compared with 53% for Facebook and 48% for Instagram.

Gillinger further added that most of the accounts would be deleted and others would be labelled as “Inactive”. However, individual reporters working for Swedish Radio Company were still free to use Twitter.

He concluded, it was worrying, however, that Twitter had reduced its workforce and that it could negatively impact Twitter's ability to handle bots, disinformation and hateful content. (Courtesy: Reuters)