Twitter has removed a label from NPR and other broadcast entities that tagged them as “government-funded media”.
Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform, reportedly emailed companies tagged with the distinction directly to alert them of the decision to remove the label.
The “government-funded media” distinction was created after Musk tagged NPR with a “state-affiliated media” label. The organization strongly pushed back against the characterization, pointing to Twitter’s own guidelines that said outlets like NPR and the BBC weren’t given the label due to their editorial independence. Twitter subsequently altered its guidelines to remove NPR from that statement.
Musk eventually walked back the changes. He said the “state-affiliated media” label “seemed accurate” in a tweet, before making the adjustment. However, after an interview with the BBC, he said the moniker would be changed to “publicly-funded media”. NPR maintains less than 1% of its annual budget comes from public funding.
In an announcement on Wednesday, April 12th, NPR said it would cease utilizing the social media platform as a distribution tool for its content. The outlet said it would institute a two-week grace period for staffers that operate the social media channels to figure out the next steps.
“At this point, I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” NPR CEO John Lansing said. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.
“It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards,” Lansing continued.
Several other public radio stations joined NPR in its boycott of Twitter.
