NPR Is The First Major News Organization To Give Up Twitter

In response to a tweet from Twitter on Wednesday, NPR said that it will stop sharing content on the social media site after it was labeled a "state-affiliated media outlet," which is also used to describe Russian and Chinese propaganda outlets.

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It is the first major U.S. news organization to stop posting new content to its 52 official Twitter accounts after Elon Musk took control of Twitter late last year, becoming the first major news organization to stop posting new content to its 52 official Twitter accounts.

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The NPR news outlet has reported that the social media company was surprised by Twitter's decision to label them as state-affiliated media after the company was labeled as such. Musk conceded to NPR in an email exchange with an NPR reporter that perhaps the label was incorrect. Twitter then changed NPR's account's title to "government-funded media," after Musk admitted that the label might not have been accurate.

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NPR is an editorially independent nonprofit organization that receives funding from the federal government, according to the news organization, but the label has still been deemed inaccurate and misleading. The outlet wrote that less than one percent of NPR's $300 million budget comes from federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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Neither NPR nor Twitter responded to requests for comments immediately. Upon being asked for a comment via Twitter, a poop emoji was posted on the request.

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A few days ago, NPR CEO John Lansing told his employees that, even if Twitter drops its designation as the national public broadcaster, NPR "won't immediately go back to using this platform.".

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It is at this point that I no longer trust the decision-making at Twitter, and I would never allow anyone who might jeopardize our credibility to have access to our content," Lansing said in response to the Twitter announcement.

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It seems that Musk tweeted a screengrab from a reporter at NPR asking what he thought of the company's decision on Wednesday afternoon. As Musk tweeted, the reporter appeared to ask if Musk had any thoughts about the company's decision. "Defund NPR," Musk replied in what appeared to be a tweet addressed directly to him.

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The BBC reported on Tuesday that Musk had agreed in his paper that he wanted the 'government-funded' tag to be removed from the BBC account, but that the BBC pointed out that the tag was no longer visible on any BBC Twitter account anymore, since it had been removed from all the BBC accounts on Twitter.

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A number of changes have been implemented by Musk since he acquired the social media platform for $44 billion, including the new label designations. Musk told me in an interview on Twitter Spaces Tuesday that the process of taking over Twitter has been extremely painful due to its "extremely high" level of pain.

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Known for regularly criticizing the media, Musk referred to The New York Times' reporting on April 2 as "propaganda" and in a tweet when he compared the company's Twitter feed to "diarrhea," Musk called the media outlet "propaganda".

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Several days later, he stripped Newsweek's verification mark, citing the company's refusal to pay for the platform's redesigned subscription service Twitter Blue, after the company refused to pay for the service.

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As Musk pulled Twitter Blue's launch in November and delayed it for a while, Twitter relaunched the updated service in December. It was Musk's tweet in which he announced that legacy verified accounts, including news organizations and journalists, would lose their checkmarks on April 20 after paying for the service. Subscribers who pay for it will receive a blue verification badge on their accounts.