The ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster, will shut down the majority of its official Twitter accounts to reduce its presence on Elon Musk’s X citing high costs and “toxic interactions” on the platform.
There will only be four remaining official accounts for Australia’s public broadcaster: @abcnews, @abcsport, @abcsport, @abchinese, and the master @abcaustralia account. ABC Chinese reaches Chinese-speaking audiences on X.
Managing Director David Anderson said the closure of the ABC’s Insiders, News Breakfast, and ABC Politics accounts earlier this year had a “positive” impact and limited the number of toxic interactions online.
Anderson in a statement commented:
There are multiple reasons for this decision.
The vast majority of the ABC’s social media audience is located on other platforms and we want to focus our effort and resources where our audiences are.
Also, we have found that closing individual program accounts helps limit the exposure of team members to the sometimes toxic interactions that unfortunately are becoming more prevalent. Concerningly, X has reduced its trust and safety teams.
Additional charges being introduced by X had also made the platform increasingly costly to us.
The move comes a month after the company announced as many as 100 jobs cuts as part of a major restructuring to a digital-first model. Over the next five years, the company will invest more resources in made-for-digital content and journalism across platforms such as ABC iview, ABC Listen, and ABC News.
Mr. Anderson said the majority of the company’s social media audience was located on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. According to Mr Anderson over the next four years the ABC is set to see the strongest audience growth on TikTok, a platform recently criticized by a senate committee investigating foreign interference.
The Chinese-based company fronted the joint standing committee earlier this month where it was grilled over its data collection processes and an incident where TikTok spied on an American journalist in a bid to track internal leaks.
In its 200-page report, the committee found TikTok had failed to disclose how often Australian data was accessed by mainland China and displayed other concerning behavior around how the information was logged.
Discontinued ABC accounts on X will be archived and have pinned posts notifying users about where they can access relevant content. The ABC’s Media Watch account will reportedly remain on the platform due to the program being independent and restricted from posting on the ABC News account.
