Elon Musk acquired Twitter to promote the truth, along with free speech. But his company is now flagging National Public Radio as a US government-controlled media outlet, even though it isn’t true, according to the radio network.
On Tuesday night, Twitter slapped a “US-state affiliated media” label on NPR’s official account— a designation that was originally designed for state-sponsored media groups, such as Russia’s Sputnik and China’s Xinhua News Agency, which are known for peddling government propaganda.
Twitter introduced the label in 2020 to help users identify accounts with ties to a particular government. But for some reason, the company has expanded the label to NPR, a nonprofit, independent media outlet that says it receives less than 1% of its funding from federal sources through grants. (That said, NPR also receives revenue from local partner radio stations, which can rely on federal funding too, as Musk notes.)
The labeling now means tweets from NPR carry a “US-state affiliated media” designation, implying that the federal government is in control of the radio network. NPR has called on Twitter to remove the designation.
“NPR and our Member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide,” tweeted NPR CEO John Lansing. “It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way.”
Twitter’s own policies say a media organization should only receive the label when it’s clear a foreign government exercises control over its editorial content “through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”
The document adds: “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.” Hence, NPR’s mission to provide independent journalism should mean the label doesn't apply.
But it looks like Musk disagrees. In a tweet, he implied the US government does exercise control over NPR, although he didn’t supply any evidence. In the meantime, some users on Twitter are demanding NPR cancel all federal funding while accusing the radio network of hiding the “Hunter Biden laptop” story.
During a Wednesday press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment directly on Twitter's decision, but "more broadly...there's no doubt of the independence of NPR's journalists," she said. "If you've ever been on the receiving end of their questions, you know this."
The incident highlights Musk’s hostile stance against traditional media, which has been critical of his takeover of Twitter and his other companies. Instead he’s been favoring citizen journalism. “There’s like something in journalism that they’ve been trained to basically never write a positive story about anything,” Musk said during a Morgan Stanley conference last month.
“Anything that’s written about will go through a negativity lens, and so you therefore have a bizarrely negative view of the world if you draw your information from newspapers,” he added. “This is simply a fact.”
This past weekend, Twitter also removed the verified badge from the official account for The New York Times after it refused to pay for Twitter Blue. In December, Musk also suspended several journalist accounts for allegedly "doxxing" his real-time location, even though the affected journalists maintained they did not.