Twitter will no longer recommend tweets from state media to users

Twitter will no longer recommend state media posts to its users through timeline, notifications, or search. The Russian RT, among others, sees and labels Twitter as the state medium. The company will also clearly label government accounts.

It social medium As of today, two new label categories have been created, which should help its users understand who certain messages are coming from. The first category concerns accounts of governments and civil servants. For this category, Twitter is currently focusing on accounts that represent a country, such as ambassadors, spokespersons, country leaders and ministers of foreign affairs.

Only accounts of the five countries that are permanently part of the UN Security Council are given these labels. Those five countries are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Later, Twitter will take more countries with it. Personal accounts of heads of state are not tagged, only the government account. The official presidential account @Potus for example has the text ‘US government account’, which is a label indicating the account @realDonaldTrump has not.

The second category is about state media. These are accounts of state media themselves, or their editors-in-chief or key employees. By state media, Twitter means media of which the government has a significant influence in journalistic content, for example through the use of financial resources or political pressure. Media with an independent editorial team, such as the British BBC, will not receive such a label, according to Twitter.

Twitter is no longer going to recommend tweets from tagged state media accounts to its users. Twitter says that such state media is often used to spread propaganda, which is presumably the reason the company chooses to stop recommending these media to its users. Twitter emphasizes that it will still recommend labeled government accounts to its users.