Twitter removed labels describing prominent news organizations as “government-funded” or “state-affiliated” after NPR and public broadcasters in several countries criticized the labels as misleading and suspended use of their Twitter accounts.
Removing the labels was the latest shift Twitter has made abruptly and without explanation under the leadership of its owner, Elon Musk.
Twitter made the change a day after it began removing checkmarks from the profiles of thousands of celebrities, politicians and journalists whose identities it verified before Musk bought the company in October for $44 billion. Twitter, which automatically responds to press inquiries via email with a poop emoji, did not immediately comment on Friday.
NPR reported that Mr. Musk said in an email that Twitter had dropped all media labels and that “this was Walter Isaacson’s suggestion,” apparently referring to the author and former media executive who is working on a book about Mr. Musk. Mr Isaacson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
NPR said last week it would suspend all use of Twitter after the social network designated the broadcaster as “U.S. state media.”
Twitter subsequently changed the label on the NPR Twitter account to “Government-funded media.” It gave the same title to PBS, which also said it would stop tweeting from his account.
NPR said last week it received 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. It said its two biggest sources of revenue are corporate sponsorships and fees paid by member stations, which rely heavily on listener donations.
PBS says on its website that because it’s not advertising, many people mistakenly believe that the government provides most of its funding. But federal funding accounts for only about 15 percent of revenue, the broadcaster said.
Twitter also applied the label “Government-funded media” to the account of the BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster, until it was changed to “government-funded media”. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation objected to Mr Musk’s decision to remove the label “69% government-funded mediaand said it interrupted the use of his Twitter account.
In a statement Thursday, the Global Task Force, a group representing the national public broadcasters of eight countries, including Canada, Britain and France, objected to Twitter’s labeling of four of its members as “government-funded media.”
The group said the “misleading label” had been applied “without warning or consultation” to the Twitter accounts of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC/Radio-Canada, the Korean Broadcasting System and Radio New Zealand. The editorial independence of all four broadcasters is legally protected and enshrined in their editorial policies, the statement said.
“Labeling them in this way misleads the public about their operational and editorial independence from government,” the group said.
That argument was similar to that of Isabel Lara, NPR’s chief communications officer, who said last week that “NPR’s organization’s accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely suggest we are not. editorially independent.”
By Friday, Twitter had removed the “government-funded” labels from the accounts of NPR, the BBC, PBS, the CBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The “state-affiliated media” label has also been removed from the Twitter accounts of China’s state news agency Xinhua and Russia’s state media outlet RT. The page on Twitter’s website describing its media labeling policy has been removed.
NPR did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday, but John Lansing, NPR’s CEO, has said the broadcaster would not immediately return to Twitter even if the “government-funded media” label were removed.
“It would take me some time to understand if Twitter can be trusted again,” he said in an interview on NPR last week.
PBS declined to comment Friday. The CBC said in an email: “We are reviewing this latest development and will put our Twitter accounts on hold before taking any further steps.”
