Just dump it.....

Elon Musk’s Twitter mislabels NPR as ‘state-affiliated’ in new anti-press move

Stephen Council

Elon Musk’s Twitter has marked NPR’s account as “US state-affiliated media,” another in a series of moves against trusted media institutions.

The Tuesday change, which mischaracterizes the editorially independent media network, will decrease the reach of NPR posts on the platform, per Twitter’s rules. It also wrongly likens the outlet to Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua News — major state-owned news agencies over which the governments exercise considerable control.

The move comes after Musk tweeted this weekend that the New York Times’ verification checkmark would be removed after the paper announced it would not pay for verification. The Times’ verification badge was scrapped as of Sunday. Outlets have not yet been forced to pay. 

NPR receives the bulk of its funding from individual contributors, corporate sponsorships, foundation donations and universities. Government funding is essential for helping its local stations, NPR says on its website, but “on average, less than 1% of NPR’s annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] and federal agencies and departments.” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a federally funded nonprofit organization.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based social media network defines “state-affiliated media” as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” Musk cited the definition in a tweet about NPR early Wednesday.

Lumping NPR into this group represents a reversal for the platform: Twitter changed its Help Center document about state-affiliated accounts on Tuesday. Before 7:30 a.m. Pacific time, the policy read, “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.”

But by 8:47 a.m., Twitter dropped the mention of NPR, according to web page data from Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Twitter’s algorithm does not recommend or amplify state-affiliated media accounts or their tweets to users, the Help Center document says, which will likely diminish NPR’s reach on the platform. The document says Twitter will label links to state-affiliated media websites and won’t amplify tweets containing them, but that label has not been added to NPR links as of this article’s publication. 

NPR President John Lansing posted a statement Wednesday protesting the “inaccurate” label, which he said he was disturbed to see Tuesday night.

“NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable,” Lansing wrote. “It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”

Lansing’s employees stuck up for the network as well — and had choice words for the Twitter CEO. Prominent anchor Jack Speer called Elon Musk an “idiot,” adding, “I have been in this business more than 35 years and have been ‘bought’ by no one!” 

Speer also posted an article about Musk’s Tesla receiving government funds, writing, “Are @Tesla and @SpaceX and @Twitter ‘U.S. state-affiliated’ companies?”

Former NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro weighed in too, linking Musk’s rhetoric about NPR and the Times and saying, “The bias as to who is being targeted on this site by its leadership is so very clear.”

None of the outlets actually run and funded by the United States Agency for Global Media have been marked with the state media tags on Twitter, including the radio network Voice of America and the agency’s regional entities Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks' Alhurra and Radio Free Asia. The government agency says on its website that its “networks’ program decisions reflect the U.S. national interest.”

Stars and Stripes, the military outlet whose distribution overseas is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, has also not been marked with the tag.