“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point.”
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Why an instance instead of joining an existing one? They can join the effort and do few ones where several publishers can use to create official accounts
Edit. Why you guys are downvoting a discussion? Is this place becoming reddit? We are just chatting, relax
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exactly this, they can control what is on it, give their journalists, shows, etc accounts and it being a self contained hub for everything bbc, while interacting with rest of the fediverse.
Im guessing they will also get more statistics and information from hosting it themselves as well. its a no brainer.
Good point
Because then someone else would be able to control and censor their content. Really every business should make their own server to ensure that they’re the ones fully in control of their content - this is the entire point of federation.
Good point. You guys are right. It is a good choice
Just for records sake, we can see recently with Musk and Twitter and how he manipulated NPR’s image by denoting them as “state media”.
I think the USA’s National Weather Service Twitter presence is a good example.
If you look deep enough you’ll see caveats like “supplemental service provided by NWS” and “Twitter feeds and tweets do not always reflect the most current information”, but the truth is that a lot of people (and news organizations) depend on Twitter as their main interface to the NWS, and rarely if ever go to their website.
That obviously creates a tension, which bubbles up in scares like this:
Contrast that to a world where NOAA (the federal administration which runs NWS) has their own instance: they get the benefit of being able to disseminate updates in a consumer friendly ‘social media’ style and they retain full control of platform and can be sure the service won’t be held hostage, or go down in the middle of a storm.
Finally: if you’re reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you’d like a fediverse presence, I did!
Thanks for the details
Good idea! I just emailed NWS.PA@noaa.gov to ask them not only for a Mastodon instance to replace this stuff, but also for a PeerTube instance to replace https://www.youtube.com/@noaanationalweatherservice .
Having their own instance as a public organization adds more legitimacy to their publications. Think of government officials using the organizations domains for email instead of gmail.
Them having their own instance would serve the same purpose as being verified because of the domain.
Thanks, makes sense
One of Germany’s public broadcasting services also started running an instance for anyone part of the federal media network: https://ard.social/about
Translation:
Also the Tagesschau, which is the most important television news show in Germany, is there.
The other one did as well (https://zdf.social)
BBC is just a propaganda apparatus of the British government.
even if that’s true, which it isn’t, wouldn’t that still be a hundred times bettee than shit like Fox News? or what Bezos did with news company he bought?
They are just the same as fox news
well that’s some ignorant shit, lol
“I have no idea what I’m saying”
I wouldn’t read too hard into it, he’s just trolling this comment thread based on his profile 🙄
It is successful troll then. They got good numbers on the down side of votes. That’s the troll goal, right?
whats about my profile?
That’s not true at all. I would like to see your evidence of claim on this one.
If you look at the structure of the BBC, it’s an INDEPENDENT, publicly funded news organisation. The government has no say in its editorial. It has exposed many British government scandals in the past.
While the person you’re replying to seems to be trolling, there is a legitimate argument that the BBC is influenced by the current government. The argument is that the current government has had a hand in appointing the current BBC director, and he’s a member of the Conservative party or a donor.
I haven’t looked into it for a while, so am not up to speed on the details, but if the detractors are correct, it’s not a good look for the BBC.
Unfortunately, BBC news has been corrupted from the inside. It used to be impressively independent of the UK government. It was happy to hold any politician’s feet to the fire. This is why the conservative party worked so hard to put their own stooge at the top. Careers now stop progressing, if you are overly critical of the government, at least in the news department.
Overall the BBC still leans slightly left, and produces a lot of good material. I no longer trust it to report evenly on our government anymore. It’s still a lot better than most news organisations overall however.
They have their moments of this. But they still do have some genuinely good stuff.
Every media is. You must filter news from multiple Organisation to understand the Real news
true that.
At least it’s not as bad as Al Jazeera.