Technology

Worth noting, for those that aren't going to bother reading the first line of the article, this is ABC the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not ABC the American Broadcasting Company

About time. Well done. More to follow, hopefully.

The BBC just set up their own Mastodon instance: https://social.bbc/@BBC_News_Labs

Reading the article with the letter X in place of Twitter makes me feel like I am reading a pre-generated article with someone forgetting to replace the placeholder with the brand name.

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.

Wow. Imagine that. It's almost as if when you let neo-nazis and far right rats take over a platform it becomes a toxic environment.

I've filed at least three reports to X about incitement of violence and racial issues, and each came back as "the did not contravene our policies". So that was the last time I opened X to read anything. It's one thing to have a differencing point of view and debate it, but it's another thing to stir up hatred without any reason or logic. It has got super toxic. I think more, and more brands are going to start realising this. No-one really needs all that negativity and hate, and there are better options on the Internet.

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!

Welcome to mastodon, ABC .

This begins with ABC, will end with other media resources. But I doubt Mastodon will be the future. Facebook and Instagram seem to be more viable options for mainstream media outlets, though I would also like to see more of them creating Mastodon servers, the way the BBC did recently.

Moving a little slow, eh?

The social media team in my company stopped buying ads on Twitter last year after Musk's chaotic purchase. And in April, have fully stopped all content posts because of extremely low engagement (and constant errors/issues with scheduling posts).