NPR has announced that it will no longer use Twitter to distribute its content after the social media platform began labeling the network as “United States-affiliated media,” which puts it in the same category as government-spoken publications such as RT and China Daily. NPR is the first major news organization to pull off the platform and it comes at a time when Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with journalism is at a nadir.
NPR’s main Twitter account has been silent since getting the label a week ago, but CEO John Lansing took the stance officially in a note sent to employees Wednesday morning. He wrote, “We do not place our journalism on platforms that have shown an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence.”
Musk’s notoriously hostile relationship with the press, and the actions he has taken over the past few weeks have escalated the situation. As Twitter made account verification available for purchase, news organizations and individual journalists alike were reluctant to participate in the pay-to-play scheme. There are a number of ports including Washington PostAnd Politicoand Vox Media (the parent company of the edge), they made it clear that they had no intention of paying to keep checkmarks for their correspondents or their main accounts. Musk tried to show he meant business by removing the badge from his the The New York Times (And only file times) after you pay it Musk’s fan account is called @DogeDesigner.
While the fact-checking struggle has been in the works for months, Musk’s fight with the press went in some unexpected directions last week. NPR’s slapping with the “state affiliate” label has surprised the organization and its followers, especially since then Twitter previously cited the network As an example of a general news organization doing this no Fits those criteria (those guidelines have since changed). Since it is very clear that NPR is not a state media, the tag has since been changed to “government funded media”. NPR receives less than 1 percent of its funding from the federal government, although member stations get a larger portion (about 13 percent) of their revenue from local and federal government sources.
This week, the BBC also received the “government-funded” tag, prompting the network to reach out directly to Musk to demand that the tag be removed. Musk said he was trying to provide “maximum transparency” for users of the platform and said he personally admires their work. “I should note that I follow BBC News on Twitter, because I think it is among the least biased,” he said on the exchange. Musk agreed to be interviewed live with the BBC after the exchange in which he said Twitter could change its name to “publicly funded” to reflect that its funding comes from public licensing fees, rather than from the government.
And (we’re not done here) in the background to all of this is Musk’s fight with Substack. Last week, Twitter began disabling the likes, retweets, and shares of tweets that contained Substack links. While Substack is not itself a news organization, it is home to the newsletters and blogs of many high-profile freelance journalists who have come to rely on Twitter for promotion and audience building. These appear to be the exact types of journalists Musk would like to support (and he has, in the case of Twitter files), but he can’t commit to Substack’s latest move to introduce a Twitter-like feature called Notes. Twitter no longer suppresses Substack links, but Substack writers have said they’re annoyed by Musk’s willingness to tinker with their livelihoods for his own sake. Musk is the second richest person in the world, with a net worth of more than $186 billion, according to Forbes.
At the heart of the issue is Twitter’s relationship to news. Musk understands that a large part of Twitter’s value is as a channel for news, whether that’s as a distributor of stories from established outlets, a promotional tool for freelance writers, or a forum for live updates and conversation on urgent topics. In contrast, news organizations and journalists have come to rely on Twitter to publish their content. The NPR designation was a unique case, but the type of musk targeting used was not. It seems unlikely that this will be the last fight we see between Musk and a certain media outlet or that NPR will be the last to call it quits.