Swedish broadcaster joins NPR, PBS, and Canada’s CBC in abandoning Twitter

Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio said on Tuesday that it would stop all activity on the social media platform Twitter, a move that follows similar decisions by U.S. and Canadian public broadcasters.

Swedish public radio service Sveriges Radio said that its decision was not related to the “publicly-funded” tag that Twitter recently added to its account, with its social media manager saying that was an accurate label.

“Sveriges Radio has for a long time de-prioritised its presence on Twitter and has now decided to stop being active on the platform altogether,” the broadcaster said.

The broadcaster became the fourth global news organization to suspend activities on Twitter in recent days as several others made the move in opposition to being mislabeled.

On Monday CBC/Radio-Canada said it would pause its Twitter activity after the network tagged its account with the “government-funded media” label. Our journalism is “impartial and independent,” and to “suggest otherwise is untrue,” CBC/Radio-Canada tweeted.

According to Twitter, government-funded media are defined as “outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”

U.S. outlets NPR and PBS quit Twitter due to “state-affiliated” and “government-funded” media labels earlier this month.

In Canada Twitter’s labeling of CBC has become a contentious political battleground. Last week Canadian conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who is campaigning to defund CBC, said that he had written to Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk to request that CBC be labeled “accurately.”

On Sunday, the “government-funded media” label appeared on some CBC Twitter feeds.

Musk later tweeted that CBC’s label had been altered to reflect that the company was “less than 70% government-funded.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Poilievre’s move an attack on Canadian “culture and local content.”

“In order to attack this institution that is important for many, many Canadians, he runs to American billionaires, the tech giants that they continue to defend,” Trudeau told reporters on Monday.