"Who is Elon Musk to determine if a media is independent?": Delphine Ernotte criticizes the boss of Twitter

Rémi Jacob, with AFP / Photo credits: Ludovic MARIN / POOL / AFP 09:15, April 24, 2023

It is "frightening" that billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network Twitter, claims to "determine if a media is independent," said Saturday the president of the French group of public channels France Televisions, Delphine Ernotte. "Twitter has tried to label all public media in the world as state media and then as government-funded or public-funded media. But finally... who is Mr. Musk to determine if a media is independent or if it is not?" said Delphine Ernotte to the daily Les Echos.

"We cannot let American actors play sorcerer's apprentice with our democracies"

"To see an American billionaire trying to play with our independence and define our public space in this way is frightening," continued the president of the public group. In recent weeks, Twitter had applied controversial mentions of "state-affiliated media" and "government-funded media" to major media accounts, before removing them on Friday.

"Twitter has backed down because the collective mobilization of public media, from Canada to Australia, has paid off," commented Delphine Ernotte. "But this raises the question of mastering our information space. We cannot let American actors, tomorrow Chinese, play sorcerer's apprentice with our democracies," she continued.

In mid-April, the American public radio NPR had left Twitter, unhappy with the mention "media affiliated with the American state", which put it on the same level as Russian outlets such as Russia Today (RT) or the official Chinese agency Xinhua (New China). Could France Télévisions and its channels leave the social network? "It's a dilemma," Ernotte replied. "The possibilities opened up by artificial intelligence to generate, at an industrial pace, fake images and videos are dizzying. In the coming mess, our national media, regulated, are compasses," she said.

The "battle" of "visibility" will be lost "if the discrimnation is done only by money"

Moreover, for the boss of France Télévisions, social networks are no longer the public square where everyone's voices were exposed uniformly. "Tomorrow, those who have paid will see their content highlighted, the others will be lost in the algorithms. The liberation of public debate brought by social networks to their creation is finally transformed into a purely commercial logic." And this "battle" of "visibility" will be lost "if discrimination is done only by money," Delphine Ernotte bitterly observed.