National Public Radio said Wednesday it would suspend all use of Twitter, just over a week after the social network designated the broadcaster a “U.S. state media.”
Twitter has since kept the label on the NPR Twitter account to “government-funded media,” a label it also applies to the BBCBritain’s national broadcaster.
“NPR’s 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,” Isabel Lara, NPR’s chief communications officer, said in a statement.
“We do not post our journalism on platforms that have expressed an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” she added.
In a letter to staff Wednesday morning, John Lansing, NPR’s CEO, wrote, “Actions by Twitter or other social media companies to compromise the independence of any public media institution are extremely damaging and set a dangerous precedent.”
In a Twitter thread On Wednesday morning, the broadcaster shared links to its newsletters and other social media sites.
In the past, Twitter had listed NPR and BBC as exceptions to its guidelines for state-affiliated accounts because they were “state-funded media organizations with editorial independence.”
Ms. Lara said last week that NPR received, on average, less than 1 percent of its annual operating budget in the form of grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies and departments.
Other media outlets have suspended their Twitter accounts in the past. In 2018, Fox News stopped tweeting for 16 months after prime-time host Tucker Carlson’s home address was posted to the site.
