The contentious issue of labelling professional media by the self-appointed guardians of free speech, Big Tech-owned social media platforms that earn billions of dollars each year, gets more curious.

The decision by Twitter to label National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA as “state-affiliated media,” which it then changed to “government-funded media” after a barrage of criticism, underscores the need to rethink the role of major social media platforms as critical gatekeepers in the public sphere. On 12 April, NPR announced that it will no longer post on its 52 Twitter channels to protect its credibility, though its journalists have been allowed to access the platform for newsgathering.

As Courtney C. Radsch of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy puts it: “The need is for better labels for (professional) news media, and the importance of insulating these designations from political interference or mercurial interventions by billionaire founders.” If competent authorities ~ ideally independent oversight institutions which comprise media and tech experts, lawyers, and government representatives ~ in national jurisdictions do not act even now, the dangers should be obvious to all.

To illustrate the point, such labelling implies equivalence between NPR and the North Korean “government-funded” Korean Central Broadcasting Station. Whatever one’s disagreements with NPR, this is a slippery slope.

It provides ready ammunition to the most illiberal of voices to press home the ‘subjectivity of objectivity’ line by bracketing public service media with state-owned media. What consumers must appreciate ~ and this is worth banging on about even if it is akin to tilting at windmills ~ is that without a clearly articulated and expressly followed public-interest agenda, media platforms are just businesses aimed at turning a profit.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to make money, when information perchance knowledge ~ the collection, processing, and dissemination of which is the raison d’être for professional media ~ becomes a commodity and not a public good, the result is the Twitter-NPR impasse. No prizes for guessing who will eventually prevail though here’s a clue: The deeper the pockets…

Working out which news media are propaganda arms of states that fund them, and which ones provide a public service and are insulated from editorial interference by the government, has again become a flashpoint in the debate over content moderation, discrimination, and defamation on social media. For starters, it must be emphasised to social media platforms on pain of punitive action that they do not have the right to institute labels on professional media accounts, and from this follows the need to define such media in an understandable way.

To be clear, the damage is already done; such action would only be part-recompensation. The conflation of professional media, for all its weaknesses, with social media, is one of the most dangerous developments emanating out of the digital revolution. While it may be too late to put the social media genie back into the bottle, at least let’s not repeat the mistake by a blind adoption of advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) without appropriate guardrails in place.