Complaint
A viewer complained the interviewer, James Clayton, made a number of inaccurate statements in the course of the interview with Mr Musk including an assertion there was more hate speech on Twitter since his takeover of the company. The ECU assessed the complaint against the standards for due accuracy set out in the 大象传媒 Editorial Guidelines.
Outcome
The complainant argued Mr Clayton 鈥渓ied鈥 when he said there was more hate speech on Twitter, and, on being challenged by Mr Musk, when he claimed he had not personally been on Twitter for a while. He also objected to the statement that the 大象传媒 is not state funded.聽聽聽聽聽
The ECU noted that Mr Clayton did not provide examples to support his suggestion. But analysis by a number of monitoring organisations had identified the return of previously banned Twitter accounts, in some numbers, which were shown to include offensive comments.
Mr Clayton鈥檚 explanation to Mr Musk as to why he had difficulty in providing examples, was that he had recently stopped 鈥渦sing a feed鈥 from Twitter. 大象传媒 News explained this was a reference to a feed powered by Twitter鈥檚 algorithm that suggests content 鈥漟or you鈥, the absence of which had restricted his exposure to general content on Twitter. As stopping such a feed would not have prevented Mr Clayton from viewing Twitter, the ECU did not accept what he said to Mr Musk was materially misleading..
The 大象传媒 is funded through the licence fee which is paid individually by viewers. The description 鈥渟tate funded鈥 or 鈥済overnment funded鈥 is therefore misleading and it was appropriate to refute that claim during the interview.
Not Upheld