'Twitter a serious danger for traditional media to control narrative'

NEW DELHI: Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Monday said that his micro-blogging platform has become a “serious danger” to traditional media outlets, as he restored legacy Blue check marks for influential users and celebrities.

Mario Nawfal, Co-founder and CEO at NFT Tech and founder of International Blockchain Consulting (IBC), said in a tweet that he never realised how much the media hates Musk until this week.

“Twitter gets criticised for $8 verification, yet no one talks about Instagram copying the strategy at almost double the price,” he posted, adding that the SpaceX launch, despite the unsurprising explosion, was a success and an incredible step forward for humanity, yet the media paints it as a failure.

“If NASA did the same thing, praise would dominate headlines. Something doesn’t add up,” posted Nawfal.

The Twitter CEO replied: “Yup. Twitter is a serious danger to their ability to control the narrative.”

Musk has always been at the loggerheads with traditional media.

After facing a severe backlash, Musk-run Twitter last week removed “government-funded media” labels on all accounts belonging to traditional publications and digital news outlets.

Twitter also deleted its web page explaining the “government-funded media” labels.

The micro-blogging platform earlier placed the ‘publicly-funded’ label to the BBC account and applied the ‘government-funded’ label to US-based NPR.

Twitter later placed more ‘government-funded media’ labels on the accounts of global news outlets like Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC Australia), Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ, Sweden’s SR Ekot and SVT, and Catalonia’s TV3.cat.

NPR decided to quit Twitter after the Musk-run platform labelled it as a government-funded organisation. After NPR, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) also left Twitter after being labelled as government-backed media.