ABC shuts down official Twitter accounts due to 'toxic interactions'

chrisbit@leminal.space to Technology@lemmy.world – 1290 points –
ABC exits Twitter: Australia’s national broadcaster shuts down almost all accounts on Elon Musk’s X
theguardian.com
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There will only be four remaining official ABC accounts: for news, sport, Chinese and the master ABC Australia account.

Somebody let me know when they actually leave twitter. This is a bullshit half measure.

I agree. I'd like to see them host their own Mastodon and leave a forwarding address on 'X'.

BBC has just started doing that at https://social.bbc

Good! They're the leading star for many public european broadcasters. I hope many will follow. I work in public sector, and I have lobbied to get IT to start up mastodon servers on our own

I think this might become more common over time.

Up to this point, a lot of the news company's online presence was probably pretty cut and dry. Some of my local news stations have terrible websites that take forever to load, yet those websites were probably cutting edge at some point. One of them has a layout that hasn't changed in at least 10 years.

If their IT department hasn't expanded their skills beyond making and maintaining those original websites, I could totally see a long delay happening before/if they join the fediverse.

If their IT department hasn't expanded their skills beyond making and maintaining those original websites, I could totally see a long delay happening before/if they join the fediverse.

More likely they aren't given the budget they have requested.

They are also probably busy doing regular IT things like maintaining the IT infrastructure.

Local news stations don't really exist in my country so I don't know how many employees they usually have but it's possible they don't even have an IT department.

Some of my local news stations have terrible websites that take forever to load, yet those websites were probably cutting edge at some point.

Nah, most local news sites came online as garbage and will never rise above that status. The cleverest of them came online as bare bones, no frills websites that the affordable local website developer they hired could actually maintain.

most local news sites came online as garbage and will never rise above that status

The amount of pop-ups, sleazy Taboola ads, and autoplay videos (with 2 ads at the beginning and end of a 30 second clip) is too damn high. Just clicking a link is a fucking assault on your eyes. And yes some form of this still happens to me with adblockers or firefox.

I guess I thought the goal was to get people to use their websites, not fucking punish them for it.

So basically they're not leaving, they are silencing their political coverage. They're not going anywhere, they're caving to pressure.

Yeah pretty much, they might as well say "we've decided to sack Jerry from the Social Media team" because this isn't actually exiting twitter it's more like reducing someone's workload lol.

What accounts did they actually remove? News and sports seem like they would be most of their presence

All the accounts for all their shows, as well as their journos. They produce a lot of original content, and have a lot of journalists. This is not an insignificant measure.

Yeah this is only a bit as the mainstay of ABC is their news account. But it is a step in the right direction.