Twitter has removed labels describing global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated.
The move came after the platform owned by American businessman Elon Musk began removing blue verification checkmarks from accounts that do not pay monthly fees.
One of the labels on the media had been posted on the account of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the English network of Radio-Canada (SRC). State-affiliated labels on media accounts such as Sputnik and RT in Russia and Xinhua in China have also been removed.
The CBC and National Public Radio in the United States announced last week that they would stop using Twitter after their main account was designated as state-affiliated media, a term also used to identify controlled media or strongly influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China.
A few hours before this measure taken by Twitter, a large number of celebrity users of the social network lost the blue hooks that allowed them to verify their identity and distinguish themselves from impostors on the platform.
After several false starts, Twitter on Thursday began delivering on its promise to remove blue brackets from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to keep them.
Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the initial blue hook verification system, including a large number of journalists, athletes and public figures. The brackets — which meant the account has been verified by Twitter to be who it claims to be — began disappearing from these users’ profiles by late morning.
