It is “scary” that the billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network Twitter, claims to “determine whether a media is independent”, protested on Saturday the president of the French group of public channels France Télévisions, Delphine Ernotte.
“Twitter tried to label all public media in the world as state media and then as government or publicly funded media. But then… who is Mr. Musk to determine whether a media outlet is independent or not? said Delphine Ernotte to the daily Les Échos. “To see an American billionaire trying to play with our independence like this and define our public space is frightening,” continued the president of the public group.
In recent weeks, Twitter had branded mainstream media accounts with controversial labels, “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media,” before removing them on Friday. “Twitter has backed down because the collective mobilization of public media, from Canada to Australia, has paid off,” commented Delphine Ernotte.
“But this raises the question of the mastery of our information space. We cannot let American actors, tomorrow Chinese, play sorcerer’s apprentices with our democracies,” she continued. In mid-April, the American public radio NPR left Twitter, unhappy with the mention “media affiliated with the American state”, which put it on the same level as Russian organs such as Russia Today (RT) or the official Chinese agency Xinhua (New China).
Could France Télévisions and its channels leave the social network? “It’s a dilemma,” replied Delphine Ernotte. “The possibilities opened up by artificial intelligence to generate, at an industrial pace, fake images and videos are dizzying. In the mess ahead, our national, regulated media are compasses,” she said.
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October, many controversies have erupted about his way of managing this platform.
