The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has on Monday announced the network has temporarily suspended the use of Twitter after the American microblogging site placed a ‘government-funded media’ label on the radio and television broadcaster’s account.

In a statement by CBC spokesperson Leon Mar said that “Twitter can be a powerful tool for our journalists to communicate with Canadians, but it undermines the accuracy and professionalism of the work they do to allow our independence to be falsely described in this way.”

“Consequently, we will be pausing our activity on our corporate Twitter account and all CBC and Radio-Canada news-related accounts,” the statement added.

Mr Mar argued the network is publicly funded via a parliamentary appropriation by votes of members of Parliament which is well-enriched in the Canadian constitution – CBC received more than $1.2 billion Canadian (US$900 million) in government funding between 2021 and 2022.

Meanwhile, VOA reported that CBC has sent a letter to Twitter asking the company to reexamine the designation.

The latest move by CBC to quit Twitter came a few days after National Public Radio (NPR), an American nonprofit media organisation suspended its Twitter usage following the decision by the social media company to label the media outlet a ‘state-affiliated media.’

However, Twitter later changed NPR’s label which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding to ‘government-funded media’.

‘State-affiliated media’ is a tag usually labelled on Twitter accounts of media outlets that are affiliated or heavily controlled by states usually China and Russia and other authoritarian governed countries.

Twitter has however decided to start spreading the labels across some of Western media outlets believed to be in some way affiliated or controlled by the government as part of restructuring aimed at equal playing field for everyone since Elon Musk’s $55 billion buyout last year.