Vinay Menon: CBC shouldn’t just hit pause on Elon Musk’s Twitter — it should quit and so should other media

It’s only a matter of time until every news outlet flees Twitter.

Maybe that’s Elon Musk’s master plan. Keep antagonizing “the media,” one passive aggressive taunt at a time. Does this make business sense? Nope. But Mr. Musk did blow $44 billion (U.S.) on a leveraged buyout to obtain the social media company.

That’s like impulse-buying a banana for $900.

Musk’s anti-MSM fatwa crossed the border this week when he slapped a label on the CBC’s official account. It was first, “Government-funded media.” The label was then amended to, “69% government-funded media,” which only amplified the lolz of Musk’s delirious fans who can’t get enough of his sophomoric trolling.

Musk claims such labels are for transparency. Right. It’s like when he claimed his guiding interest in Twitter was “free speech.” Then he fired anyone who disagreed with anything he said. So if some now believe there is no qualitative difference between the CBC and North Korean state television, this is Musk shrugging and smirking and plotting his next antagonism.

Clicking on the new CBC label takes you to a Twitter Help Center page where “government-funded media is 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.”

For accuracy, Musk could have worked “Crown corporation,” “parliamentary appropriations” and “Broadcasting Act” into his label so drive-by tweeters outside of Canada know the CBC operates with editorial independence. On Tuesday morning, the most popular story on the public broadcaster’s site was: “Trudeau family vacationed with wealthy friends who donated to Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.”

I have a hunch the government was not involved in that editorial content.

In response to the label, CBC is hitting “pause” on Twitter. As Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief of CBC News, wrote: “We cannot in good conscience continue to post fact-based news and information to Twitter, or engage on it, while a false impression of government involvement in our work is allowed to stand.”

This follows NPR quitting Twitter a few days ago after it was falsely labelled “state-affiliated media.” Meanwhile, Musk grants an interview this week to Tucker Carlson, a blithering propagandist and demonstrable liar who failed spectacularly in trying to whitewash the Jan. 6 insurrection as “sightseeing.” More recently, Mr. Carlson is calling for America to “liberate” Canada, as if we are imprisoned in a Soviet gulag.

It would be hysterical if it wasn’t so sad.

This is why the CBC should not hit “pause” on Twitter — it should quit for good.

All media outlets should bid sayonara to Musk until he ceases to be a man-boy in which the arrested development manifests in hasty mandates and poop emojis.

Musk isn’t just running his social media company into the ground.

He is leading a doomsday cult hostile to all institutions.

What’s bonkers is how he doesn’t seem to realize he needs “the media” way more than it needs him. When content is linked on Twitter, what is the average click-through rate? How often does it exceed five per cent? Every time I hit send on a column, I pray for a little Google juice. Google News can move the metrics needle.

Twitter does not drive traffic. It makes banging noises inside silos where the terminally biased retweet hot takes without actually reading what was posted. Twitter is like going to the zoo and making value judgments about the animals from the parking lot.

Musk says Twitter is a “town square.” Give me a break. The vast majority of people on this planet do not use Twitter and never will. A small minority of active users produce most of the content. If every journalist and every media outlet quit Twitter tomorrow, the site would be overrun with frothing partisans, conspiracy theorists and rabble rousers with alphanumeric handles operating out of foreign troll farms.

Musk’s fans believe their brave folk hero is taking a blowtorch to “the media.” He is only burning himself. Once media outlets, publicly funded or otherwise, discover Twitter is a grand illusion of overstated cultural influence, they will leave and won’t come back. On Tuesday, the Hill reported a “drop in Twitter referrals to news websites in recent months.” The New York Times, for example, went “from roughly 7.5 million in March 2022 to under 4 million this March.”

No wonder the Times has balked at paying for a verified check mark.

Why pay for a monthly membership for the privilege of joining a doomsday cult?

Elon Musk could have improved Twitter by waging war on bots and hate speech and misinformation. Instead, he keeps picking idiotic fights with news organizations to rack up the likes and retweets of admirers who already despise “the media.” It’s as if he bought a grocery chain just to throw eggs at its most loyal customers.

His obsession with labels is also hypocritical. Without millions in government subsidies, Tesla would be a local garage that hawks discounted rims and meme paint jobs. Take away the billions in federal contracts and SpaceX is basically an earthly maker of rockets that couldn’t clear the CN Tower.

Where are the “government-funded” labels on Tesla and SpaceX?

When the Taliban can buy verified accounts on Twitter, and NPR or the CBC are undermined for the spectator sport, Musk’s priorities are beyond screwed up.

Every media outlet should quit Twitter.

Only then will Elon Musk realize the perils of lolz.

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