This is the best summary I could come up with:
The ABC is shutting down almost all of its official accounts on Twitter – now known as X under Elon Musk’s ownership – citing “toxic interactions”, cost and better interaction with ABC content on other social media platforms.
Anderson said the closure of the Insiders, News Breakfast and ABC Politics accounts earlier this year limited the amount of toxic interactions which had grown more prevalent under Musk and made engagement with the shows more positive.
“We also found that closing individual program accounts helps limit the exposure of team members to the toxic interactions that unfortunately are becoming more prevalent on X,” he said.
The announcement comes after the corporation recently shifted resources towards making content for other social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram.
Anderson said the vast majority of the ABC’s social media audience was located on official sites on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
The ABC is the third big public service broadcaster to remove itself from Twitter, following NPR and PBS in April.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Tbh this sounds like it’s more about cost cutting and “toxic” twitter is the excuse to cut down on their use and move resources to other platforms. The fact they have left other accounts up would seem to hint that they will cope with “toxic” users to a certain point.
Still good to see bigger entity’s leaving.
Roll
There will only be four remaining official ABC accounts: for news, sport, Chinese and the master ABC Australia account.
Somebody let me know when they actually leave twitter. This is a bullshit half measure.
I agree. I’d like to see them host their own Mastodon and leave a forwarding address on ‘X’.
I think this might become more common over time.
Up to this point, a lot of the news company’s online presence was probably pretty cut and dry. Some of my local news stations have terrible websites that take forever to load, yet those websites were probably cutting edge at some point. One of them has a layout that hasn’t changed in at least 10 years.
If their IT department hasn’t expanded their skills beyond making and maintaining those original websites, I could totally see a long delay happening before/if they join the fediverse.
If their IT department hasn’t expanded their skills beyond making and maintaining those original websites, I could totally see a long delay happening before/if they join the fediverse.
More likely they aren’t given the budget they have requested.
They are also probably busy doing regular IT things like maintaining the IT infrastructure.
Local news stations don’t really exist in my country so I don’t know how many employees they usually have but it’s possible they don’t even have an IT department.
Some of my local news stations have terrible websites that take forever to load, yet those websites were probably cutting edge at some point.
Nah, most local news sites came online as garbage and will never rise above that status. The cleverest of them came online as bare bones, no frills websites that the affordable local website developer they hired could actually maintain.
So basically they’re not leaving, they are silencing their political coverage. They’re not going anywhere, they’re caving to pressure.
What accounts did they actually remove? News and sports seem like they would be most of their presence
I hope more broadcasters will follow the BBC’s example and start running their own Mastodon servers.
It would be nice if the BBC instance had more accounts, like for breaking news, though. I know they’re just testing the waters, but they need to try having accounts posting things folks are the most interested in.
They’re just testing it out for now.
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
I hadn’t heard about it either but according to their blog post announcing it, it’s https://social.bbc
Apparently they’ll be running it for six months and then determining if it’s worth continuing to operate.
isn’t it pretty hard to determine if it’s worthwhile if they aren’t going all-in on making it an interesting place with breaking news & accounts for certain types of news etc?
Was a interesting reaction from some in the fediverse stating they would block the BBC instance etc. In reality how welcome are entity’s that are seen as corporate?
I also cannot understand why the BBC news is not live, possibly they are experimenting with the moderation and management elements. I guess the news feed would get hit harder than Radio 4.
Iirc, the big instance declaring immediately that it would defederate with them was one that’s very well known for being strict with moderation and had firm rules about anti-trans instances. Because the BBC has a history of being anti-trans, they defederated.
The BBC has a history of being antitrans?
That’s quite a revelation to me, it has more of a reputation of being extremely liberal and indeed any even remotely right winger here usually whinges and moans about how “woke” it is 🤷🏻♂️
Do you know what in particular triggered their stance that they believed the BBC anti-trans?
I hate defederation with a passion and I’m close to leaving lemmy.world because of its rash defederating. There is no reason to restrict users based on what the few leaders believe.
Socialist as in they send enforcers to your house who have the right to force themselves inside and check how many screens you have got feeding government propaganda into your skull.
You have to pay a TV licence to be lied to. Pretty sweet.
There are some on mastodon that want to live in a fairly defensively disconnected/defederated bubble (compared to many other instances or lemmy/kbin).
And, IMO, that’s totally fine and good … freedom of association gives people and instances that power and it should be embraced when people chose to exercise it TBH, so long as it’s done by admins in a way that isn’t too autocratic against their users and open and transparent.
