Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend
ABC shuts down official Twitter accounts due to 'toxic interactions'
Submitted 1 year ago by unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone to australia@aussie.zone
Comments
nEODiE@lemmy.world 1 year ago
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
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!
youngalfred@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Interesting that they point out closing the Insiders account - from my perspective it seemed like running away from viewers who were begging them to actually ask relevant questions of guests, such as the live royal Commission that didn’t get a mention for 4 weeks.
abhibeckert@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Do you mean like this?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=psq52CUjqJI
That topic has been discussed regularly by ABC and Insiders for something like three years. So what if they decided to cover something else for 4 weeks? Insiders is not a news show, it’s an interview show. The topics and timing of each topic is limited by the availability of people being interviewed.
HollandJim@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good bot
Marin_Rider@aussie.zone 1 year ago
social media in general has just become cookers shouting at each other and anyone that will listen, twitter more than most. nothing would be lost by stopping to fuel the Qaddicts lunacy
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Title is a bit misleading:
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.
There will only be four remaining official ABC accounts: @abcnews, @abcsport, @abcchinese and the master @abcaustralia account. ABC Chinese reaches Chinese-speaking audiences on X.
“Starting from today, other ABC accounts will be discontinued,” the ABC managing director, David Anderson, has told staff.
So they’re keeping their main, largest accounts alive.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 1 year ago
I’m surprised they stuck with Twitter even though they were labelled as state media
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Why would they leave over that? That’s just a fact. They are state media. YouTube shows the same label.
Sure, it’s a bit unfair to tar the ABC with the same brush as RT, but it’s reasonably easy for a viewer to see that one is state media of Australia and the other is state media of Russia, and that those two are obviously not equivalent.
Ilandar@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Based.
Auzy@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Good. Not sure why anyone is still on there
Ilandar@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Sunk cost fallacy, I guess. There’s also no clear alternative at the moment (at least for normies, who are the people still using Twitter). No one seems to like Threads and everything else is either too small or too confusing. The few Twitter users I know seem more interested in Bluesky than Mastodon, I guess because of its ties to Twitter and the very similar UI.
JasSmith@kbin.social 1 year ago
I, for one, am devastated that I will no longer be seeing ABC’s hard hitting tweets about forklifts and the lottery. It is truly a devastating day for the nation and the world.
alaxitoo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I saw on X (lol) that abcbrisbane was being archived, now I know why thank you 🙏
shirro@aussie.zone 1 year ago
I don’t mind reading the ABC news headlines direct or getting it second hand from lemmy posts to aussie.zone. I find the Twitter/X model annoying and a waste of time and Mastodon is only a little better. Too much noise. It is a shame they recently killed their RSS feeds as it was the OG fediverse and I could see myself going back to using RSS as the rest of the Internet keeps getting shittier.
SirSpud@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Bets on which news broadcaster will be the next one to pull out? Seeing Twitter’s (sorry, X’s) downfall in real-time is quite satisfying.
quitenormal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Surprised to know they even had an account there in the first place.
Default@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Why wouldn’t they have? Unfortunately every media organisation used Twitter
pantheon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hopefully the ABC will follow the BBC in setting up accounts in the Fediverse
Chariotwheel@kbin.social 1 year ago
German public broadcast also have their own mastodon instances:
https://ard.social/explore
https://zdf.social/@ZDF
And the German ARD is actually the biggest public broadcaster network in the world.
Kikkertje@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Nice!
Nath@aussie.zone 1 year ago
BBC went mastodon though. Which makes perfect sense: They’ve been heavy Twitter users.
The nature of what they do though lends itself better to Lemmy in my opinion: Post a link to the article, and have a threaded discussion exclusively relating to that matter contained in the post. I think it’s more elegant than the trending hashtag thingy.
I’m also a windbag though, and prefer to have the option of longer-winded responses than the 500-character limit. A 500-character limit comment would end here.
be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 1 year ago
Firefish.social (or other Firefish instances) has your back FYI. IMO it's everything good about Mastodon in a nicer package with greater functionality. Federates with Mastodon, but has full (if basic) blogging (Pages they call them), and a default 4000 character limit on toots/microblog posts.
This has become my reddit, but I really like Firefish as my twitter/mastodon/potential blog site. If I had to give up one of them, I'd keep Firefish.
Salvo@aussie.zone 1 year ago
The problem for media organisations with forum discussions (Lemmy, kbin, Reddit, actual forums) is that they have less control of the narrative. You need to employ (and provide mental health care) to moderators, which gets expensive quickly.
Mastodon (and other microblogs) are much more convenient because the publisher can dump their headline and blurb, but don’t need to maintain the discussion further. If a dog-pile happens, it doesn’t effect the original content.
BNE@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
It would be so cool if they set up instances!