AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
NPR said it's not posting to its 52 official Twitter accounts anymore after the social media platform labeled the news organization as "state-affiliated media" and "government-funded media" last week.
NPR's CEO John Lansing said quitting Twitter will allow NPR to continue producing journalism without "a shadow of negativity," NPR reported.
"The downside, whatever the downside, doesn't change the fact," Lansing told NPR. "I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility."
On April 8, four days after giving NPR the "state-affiliated" label — a description usually reserved for outlets like Russia Today and China's Xinhua News Agency — Twitter changed the label to "government-funded media," after CEO Elon Musk admitted that the social media platform might have been wrong. Russia Today is funded and run by the Russian government, and Xinhua is the official state news agency of the Chinese government.
Boston's NPR affiliate, WBUR, Hawaii Public Radio, and LAist, a Los Angeles-focused outlet, have joined NPR and will no longer post their content to Twitter in protest over Musk's decisions. PBS hasn't tweeted since April 8; the organization told Axios it stopped tweeting from the account after the "government-funded media" label was added to its account over the weekend.
Hours after NPR announced its decision, Musk tweeted a series of jokes and insults at the outlet's expense — including "Defund NPR." Musk also falsely claimed that NPR's updated its website to remove the part that said federal funding is "essential to public radio," but it was still present on the page as of Wednesday afternoon.
Twitter's Help Center formerly mentioned NPR and the BBC as examples of state-financed media organizations that have editorial independence and therefore wouldn't be labeled as "state-affiliated media."
But the Help Center now defines "government-funded media" as outlets that receive some or all of their funding from the government, and "may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content." The page says Twitter may rely on lists, including one linked from Wikipedia, to determine which outlets receive the tags. The page also includes a new definition for "publicly-funded media," which appears to be the category the main BBC account now falls under.
NPR said that the new "government-funded" label is still "inaccurate and misleading," considering the organization is private, nonprofit, and has editorial independence. Lansing told the news outlet that even if Twitter removes the label, NPR won't immediately come back.
"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," Lansing told NPR. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."
Staff and journalists who work at NPR can decide if they want to stay on Twitter, Lansing told NPR. In an email to NPR staff, Lansing wrote that that "it would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards," NPR reported.
In a statement shared with Insider, NPR said its "organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent."
"We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities," NPR said in the statement. "There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content."
In what could be its last Twitter thread, NPR shared links to its app, newsletters, and other social media platforms.
