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ABC exiting Twitter: Australia’s national broadcaster shuts down almost all accounts on Elon Musk’s X.

ABC exiting Twitter: Australia’s national broadcaster shuts down almost all accounts on Elon Musk’s X

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/abc-australia-leaves-twitter-x-elon-musk

The public broadcaster says interactions on the platform are ‘toxic’ as it closes almost all its Twitter accounts

ABC exiting Twitter: Australia’s national broadcaster shuts down almost all accounts on Elon Musk’s X

The public broadcaster says interactions on the platform are ‘toxic’ as it closes almost all its Twitter accounts.

13 comments

gladflag

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I hope they start their own fediverse. Lemmy or mastodon would be great.

heartfelthumburger

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They should do as BBC did. Spin up their own Mastodon instance.

transmatrix

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It really makes the most sense. I mean, all these big companies manage their own webservers and mail servers, why shouldn't they also host a Mastodon server?

Carighan

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Yeah it was amazing to see even the BBC start up their own instance and join Mastodon. Hope something similar happens here.

Gsus4

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~~Last time I checked, they were just mirroring Xcrements with links to said Xcrement :/ talk about a half-assed attempt.~~

PS: turns out I was catastrophically wrong, they have an instance with the works e.g. BBC_News_Labs@social.bbc

youngalfred

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But they're leaving their two main accounts - news and sports - on Twitter? The two things that people really use the ABC for?

Sounds like an 'exit' to me.

Dirk

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As usual. Another thing some of them do is announcing their Mastodon account but in reality it is nothing more than a Twitter repost bot and zero interaction.

INHALE_VEGETABLES

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Ripe for some dank shitposts.

BNE

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Nah - the ABC was pretty big on its twitter integration. We had a few long running, decade+ old forum-style shows where people could/would tweet in live to be part of the program.

This is a big thing for Aunty, in terms of its culture.

Selmafudd

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I'm just guessing here but I'd assume this is a knock-on effect from Stan Grant's resignation from copping abuse, if individual show's accounts are closed and they just leave the general news or sport accounts you would think people are less likely to associate those account with a presenter of a specific show to target hate towards that individual. We also have the recent industrial relation laws around the employer's responsibility in providing a mentally safe work environment.

Wildchandelure

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There will only be four remaining official accounts for Australia’s public broadcaster: @abcnews, @abcsport, @abcchinese and the master @abcaustralia account. ABC Chinese reaches Chinese-speaking audiences on X.

Pretty sure this is just their biggest things left over, which doesn't seem to be doing much? It's odd.

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

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,” Anderson said.

The announcement comes after the ABC 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.

“Twitter reminds me of sitting in the newsroom, watching the feeds come in from the world’s great media organisations: Reuters, Dow Jones and Associated Press, the New York Times, The Guardian, AFP,” he said in 2010.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

original_reader

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Musk's meltdown in 3... 2... 1....