The UK's public service broadcaster the BBC has criticized Twitter's decision to label its main account on the social media platform as "government funded media." The corporation stated in an article on its News section that it had contacted Twitter over the designation, demanding the issue be resolved "as soon as possible."

"The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the license fee," it said. 

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Elon Musk reportedly responded to the BBC's protests by saying he considered the broadcaster to be one of the "least biased" outlets. But he later replied to a comment from another Twitter account on the issue by saying: "We need to add more granularity to editorial influence, as it varies greatly."

"I don't actually think the BBC is as biased as some other government-funded media, but it is silly of the BBC to claim zero influence," he wrote. "Minor government influence in their case would be accurate," the Twitter CEO added. 

The BBC reported that in its exchange with Musk, he appeared to suggest that the social media platform might provide a label that would link to "exact funding sources."

Funding dispute

The @BBC account, which has 2.2 million followers and mainly shares updates about non-news material, is the only account from the corporation to have been given the label. Its main news accounts have so far escaped the designation. 

About 70 percent of the corporation's total income in 2022 - £5.3 billion ($6.5bn) - came from a license fee, which is required by law to watch its TV broadcasts and online streaming in the UK. 

The fee is paid for by individual UK households, but set and allocated by the government. The remainder of the corporation's revenue, it says, comes from commercial activities, such as royalties, grants and rental income.

The UK government does, however, give £90 million ($111 million) to its BBC World Service each year. And last month the government also awarded a one-off payment of £20 million ($24.7 million) to the BBC World Service to "protect" all 42 language services over the next two years.

In recent years the corporation has come under fire by former presenters over the close links between its senior management and the UK's main political parties, with some former political aides going on to work in top positions at the BBC, and vice versa.

Other broadcasters

This week, Twitter also applied the designation of "government funded media" to the U.S. public broadcaster NPR's handle for the first time. It had originally labeled NPR as "state-affiliated media", but the designation was later changed. 

The U.S. social media site's "state-affiliated media" designation, it says, is given to outlets "where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution."

Chinese and Russian media outlets have been exceptionally targeted under the policy, which was introduced in 2020. But up until now, accounts affiliated with the western media, like NPR and the BBC, have largely been exempt from the policy.

Another U.S. social media giant, Facebook, puts similar labels under content from non-Western state-affiliated media organizations, but not for broadcasters like the BBC and NPR.

When Twitter's policy was first introduced, Russia's state-run news network RT criticized the decision, saying that "a U.S. company long in bed with the U.S. establishment, telling the entire rest of the world what it can and cannot say, is the definition of a technological dictatorship and censorship."