ABC shuts down official Twitter accounts due to 'toxic interactions'
The public broadcaster says interactions on the platform are ‘toxic’ as it closes almost all its Twitter accounts
Hopefully the ABC will follow the BBC in setting up accounts in the Fediverse
German public broadcast also have their own mastodon instances:
And the German ARD is actually the biggest public broadcaster network in the world.
Nice!
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.
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.
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 and comments.
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.
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.
It would be so cool if they set up instances!
Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend
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!
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.
Do you mean this royal comission?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psq52CUjqJI
That topic has been discussed regularly by ABC and on Insiders since 2016. So what if they covered other topics for a few episodes? It's a talk show. The topics and timing are limited by the availability of people on the panel.
If you want good coverage, by people who know what they're talking about, you have to wait for them to be available.
Good bot
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
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.
Good. Not sure why anyone is still on there
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.
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.
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 an RSS reader as the rest of the Internet keeps getting shittier.
I saw on X (lol) that abcbrisbane was being archived, now I know why thank you 🙏
Based.
Surprised to know they even had an account there in the first place.
Why wouldn't they have? Unfortunately every media organisation used Twitter
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.
