NPR will no longer update the 52 Twitter accounts, including the primary account @NPR which has nearly 9 million followers. These accounts include NPR topic feeds such as NPR policyas well as individual radio programs such as Weekend Edition.
Last week, Twitter tagged NPR’s “state media,” representing the nonprofit’s American news in the same way it refers to RT, Russia’s state-backed mouthpiece that pushes the Kremlin’s talking points to the wider world. But the US government does not have any kind of editorial control over NPR, and the news organization only received about 1% of its budget from federal funding in 2020. The label in NPR’s account has been modified to “government-funded media,” so far NPR representatives said. This description remains misleading.
“At this point, I’ve lost faith in Twitter’s decision-making,” John Lansing, CEO of NPR, told an NPR reporter. “I will need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
According to Twitter, “Funded by the governmentThe “rating” applies to any news outlet that receives any funding “in part or in whole” from the government, and which “may have varying degrees of government involvement in editorial content.” Twitter also assigned this label to BBC.
Twitter owner Elon Musk targeted mainstream media like The New York Times, account stripping — followed by 55 million people – from the checked mark. All verified accounts that don’t subscribe to Twitter Blue are expected to lose their checkmark by April 20 (delayed from April 1), but the social platform has taken additional care to remove the New York Times badge as soon as possible. This makes it very easy for users to impersonate the main news source, and can also create confusion as to whether or not this account is real.