NPR quits Twitter over Elon Musk’s ‘government-funded’ label

NPR said it will stop tweeting after Twitter labeled its accounts as government-funded media, becoming the most prominent news organization to quit the social media platform since Elon Musk purchased it last year.

Twitter and Musk tagged NPR’s main account as “state-affiliated media” this month, before softening the language to “government-funded” last weekend. NPR, which receives some taxpayer funds but is independently controlled, lambasted those disclaimers in a statement Wednesday.

“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” it said. “We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities.”

The organization plans to no longer tweet from its flagship @NPR account, which has 8.8 million followers, or from related institutional accounts, such as @NPRMusic, which has nearly 745,000 followers.

NPR effectively stopped tweeting news updates last week, after the “state-affiliated” label was added to its account. Its apparent final tweets – all posted Wednesday morning – directed readers to its newsletters and accounts on other social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok.

At least three public radio stations – KCRW in Santa Monica, California, WEKU in eastern Kentucky and WESA in Pittsburgh – have announced that they would no longer post content on Twitter. But NPR itself leaving sharply escalates recent hostilities between the news media and Musk, the conservative billionaire who has managed Twitter in an often erratic fashion.

Fox News suspended its Twitter activity for 18 months in 2018 after protesters tweeted host Tucker Carlson’s home address, but it resumed in 2020.

CBS News suspended tweeting for two days in November, shortly after Musk bought Twitter and began undoing years worth of security and anti-hate policies.

NPR has maintained since last week that Twitter and Musk were seeking to disparage it and other publicly funded news organizations by associating them with government propaganda outlets, such as Russia’s RT and the Chinese Communist Party’s CCTV and People’s Daily media outlets – all of which bear a “state-affiliated media” tag on Twitter.

Twitter has also recently placed the “government-funded” label on other news outlets that receive some public support, such as PBS, BBC and Voice of America. The BBC has also objected but continues to tweet.

Twitter responded to an email seeking comment on Wednesday with a poop emoji, its response to all press inquiries lately.

In a memo to employees Wednesday morning, NPR chief executive John Lansing wrote that “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.”

In an interview with NPR the same day, Lansing said the company would not immediately return to Twitter even if the labels were removed. “At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he said. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

Since Musk assumed control of Twitter in a $44 billion deal, he has taken a confrontational, sometimes erratic, stance with journalists. Earlier this month, he removed the blue verification mark from the New York Times’s main account, after the Times publicly said it would not pay for verification. In December, he banned about a dozen reporters, including those from The Washington Post, the New York Times and Voice of America, for tweeting about a controversy involving a Twitter account that had tracked his private jet travel.

In a combative interview with a BBC reporter Tuesday, Musk insisted he had appointed his dog as CEO of Twitter.

Last week, Musk admitted in an email exchange with an NPR reporter that he didn’t fully understand the broadcaster’s relationship to the government when he ordered it to be designated as state-affiliated. Told by the reporter that NPR receives only about 1% of its annual revenue from the federal government, Musk replied: “Well, then we should fix” the designation.

NPR receives about 40% of its annual revenue from sponsorships and about 30% from programming fees paid by hundreds of public radio stations. These stations, in turn, typically receive varying levels of university, state and federal support, as well as sponsorships and listener donations.

Twitter previously had published rules that explicitly exempted NPR from the state-affiliated tag, which was applied to accounts when the state “exercises control” over the organization’s editorial operations.