• This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The ABC is shutting down almost all of its official accounts on Twitter – now known as X under Elon Musk’s ownership – citing “toxic interactions”, cost and better interaction with ABC content on other social media platforms.

    Anderson said the closure of the Insiders, News Breakfast and ABC Politics accounts earlier this year limited the amount of toxic interactions which had grown more prevalent under Musk and made engagement with the shows more positive.

    “We also found that closing individual program accounts helps limit the exposure of team members to the toxic interactions that unfortunately are becoming more prevalent on X,” he said.

    The announcement comes after the corporation recently shifted resources towards making content for other social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram.

    Anderson said the vast majority of the ABC’s social media audience was located on official sites on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

    The ABC is the third big public service broadcaster to remove itself from Twitter, following NPR and PBS in April.


    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • Interesting that they point out closing the Insiders account - from my perspective it seemed like running away from viewers who were begging them to actually ask relevant questions of guests, such as the live royal Commission that didn’t get a mention for 4 weeks.

      • Do you mean this royal comission?

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psq52CUjqJI

        That topic has been discussed regularly by ABC and on Insiders since 2016. So what if they covered other topics for a few episodes? It’s a talk show. The topics and timing are limited by the availability of people on the panel.

        If you want good coverage, by people who know what they’re talking about, you have to wait for them to be available.

        • Perhaps I should’ve been more specific - the Insiders twitter had been shut down since near the start of the year.

          The first four (at least) episodes of the show featured no mention of the royal Commission, which at the time was releasing damning findings and testimony what seemed like every few days. It was big news - just not on Insiders, where they can actually interview those part of it.

          The insiders Twitter was full of people pointing out the lack of coverage, with no acknowledgement except for an abrupt shut down.

          Really felt reminiscent of the ‘don’t mention NBN’ in Q+A years ago.

  •  Zagorath   ( @Zagorath@aussie.zone ) 
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    911 months ago

    Title is a bit misleading:

    The ABC is shutting down almost all of its official accounts on Twitter – now known as X under Elon Musk’s ownership – citing “toxic interactions”, cost and better interaction with ABC content on other social media platforms.

    There will only be four remaining official ABC accounts: @abcnews, @abcsport, @abcchinese and the master @abcaustralia account. ABC Chinese reaches Chinese-speaking audiences on X.

    “Starting from today, other ABC accounts will be discontinued,” the ABC managing director, David Anderson, has told staff.

    So they’re keeping their main, largest accounts alive.

    • Sunk cost fallacy, I guess. There’s also no clear alternative at the moment (at least for normies, who are the people still using Twitter). No one seems to like Threads and everything else is either too small or too confusing. The few Twitter users I know seem more interested in Bluesky than Mastodon, I guess because of its ties to Twitter and the very similar UI.

  •  shirro   ( @shirro@aussie.zone ) 
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    11 months ago

    I don’t mind reading the ABC news headlines direct or getting it second hand from lemmy posts to aussie.zone. I find the Twitter/X model annoying and a waste of time and Mastodon is only a little better. Too much noise. It is a shame they recently killed their RSS feeds as it was the OG fediverse and I could see myself going back to using an RSS reader as the rest of the Internet keeps getting shittier.