Social media platform Twitter is going to label government-funded and content-influenced media and limit the scope of its accounts.
It is a new attempt to reduce the foreign political influence, the American company reports Thursday.
“Unlike the independent media, state-linked media often use their news coverage for political purposes,” Twitter said. “We believe that people have the right to know when media are directly or indirectly linked to government players.”
Editors and prominent journalists of those media will also be labelled. Profiles with such a label will no longer be brought to the fore by Twitter, and therefore no longer appear between the recommended Tweets of the users.
Media that are funded by state players but are “editorially independent”, such as the British BBC and the American NPR, are not involved.
