Twitter Removes ‘State Affiliated’ & ‘Government Funded’ Labels After NPR Exit
This new era of Twitter has seen the social network ceaselessly revising policies relating to its ‘verified’ check marks, which has also led to a continuous restructuring of how official accounts should be certified and the exit of NPR from the platform entirely.
In April this year, Twitter added a label to independent media outlet NPR’s account that described it as “US state-affiliated media.” According to Gizmodo, Twitter defined such categorization as “outlets where the state controls editorial content through funding or political pressure.”
In response, a reporter for NPR, Bobby Allyn, told Twitter CEO Elon Musk that the publication only receives 1% of its funding from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Via NPR’s report, it “does not publish news at the government’s direction.” This led to Musk changing the label to “Government Funded Media.” Despite all being independent, PBS, the BBC, and Voice of America received the new tags.
NPR CEO John Lansing sent an email to staff announcing the outlet’s exit from the platform and citing the inaccurate classification. “Actions by Twitter or other social media companies to tarnish the independence of any public media institution are exceptionally harmful and set a dangerous precedent,” Lansing wrote in his account.
NEW: NPR has decided it will no longer participate on Twitter due to inaccurate labelling of our main account.
— Geoff Brumfiel (@gbrumfiel) April 12, 2023
Twitter doesn't make or break anything we do as an organization, and so there's not much benefit for staying.
Full statement from CEO John Lansing below. pic.twitter.com/fHYC7El6Wr
After everything, Musk has since removed all media labels and told Allyn that the idea of them was brought up by author and journalist Walter Isaacson, who wrote Steve Jobs’ biography—and working on Musk’s.
NEW: Elon Musk tells me Twitter has now dropped all media labels. Asked why, Musk says: “This was Walter Isaacson’s suggestion.”
— Bobby Allyn (@BobbyAllyn) April 21, 2023
[via Mashable and NPR, Photo 256601147 © Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com]
