Sweden Public Radio Exits Twitter: How Will it Impact Their Audience?

Sweden’s public radio announced on Tuesday that they will no longer be using Twitter. This decision has nothing to do with the labels that the social media platform owned by Elon Musk added for public broadcasters, which caused some popular North American media outlets to leave Twitter.

Sveriges Radio reported that people in Sweden no longer care about Twitter. National Public Radio and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation think this is because of a change to their policy, which labels them as institutions funded by the government – hurting their reputation.

Christian Gillinger, the head of Sveriges Radio’s social media activities said that they will stop using Twitter completely and close some accounts. This decision was made because only 7% of Swedes use Twitter daily now, so it has become much less important to them.

Gillinger said that the audience doesn’t come to Twitter anymore, so Sveriges Radio is deleting their remaining accounts. SR Ekot will still be on Twitter but won’t be active – it will remain inactive even though it’s called “publicly funded media”.

Sveriges Radio has been on Twitter since 2009, and they’ve recently noticed the trouble going on with the social media platform. That includes a lot of layoffs and it could affect how well they can stop bad stuff like fake accounts, bots, false info, and hateful messages.

Elon Musk, who has had a negative view of reporters, put labels on public broadcasters to try and make “average people” more important. Because of this, Canada’s CBC said it was going to stop using Twitter because the label falsely described its independence from government funding.

NPR and PBS both announced that they are making changes for a specific reason.