NPR quits Elon Musk’s Twitter over ‘government-funded’ label

With this NPR becomes the first major news media organisation to do so on the social media platform since its $44 billion acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk last October.

“NPR will no longer actively maintain its flagship Twitter (@NPR) or any other official NPR accounts, and we are officially deemphasising Twitter across the organisation,” the media company said in a statement.

“We have made this decision after Twitter refused repeated requests to remove an inaccurate label designating NPR as ‘state-affiliated media’. The label has since been changed to ‘government-funded media,’ which does not accurately capture our public media governance structure and still sends Twitter users to an explanation that implies ‘government involvement over editorial content.’ We believe this label is intended to call in question our editorial independence and undermine our credibility. If we continued tweeting, every post would carry that misleading label,” it added.

NPR said that it received less than 1% of its $300 million annual budget from the federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. By going silent on Twitter, NPR’s chief executive says the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity”, the report added.

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Earlier this week, Twitter had also labelled the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as “government-funded media”, a move to which the UK-based media organisation objected. “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” it had said.

However on Wednesday, at a Twitter Spaces session, Musk said that he was open to changing the BBC’s label to ‘publicly-funded media’ instead. “If we use the same words that the BBC uses to describe itself, that presumably would be OK…that seems to pass a reasonable test,” he said.

Twitter has been using the “state-affiliated media” label even prior to Musk’s acquisition of the company, but has typically only designated media organisations with direct ties to government entities such as China’s Xinhua, or Russia Today (RT).

In Wednesday’s Twitter Spaces session, talking in the context of taking down posts related to the BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Musk pointed out that being compliant with India’s laws was better than having employees go to jail. He added that India’s social media laws were “quite strict” and that Twitter couldn’t “go beyond the laws of the country”.