Twitter added a label to National Public Radio’s account on the social network on Tuesday night, referring to the broadcaster as “U.S. state media.”
The move comes as Twitter has announced sweeping — and unevenly applied — changes to some of its policies, such as the verification checkbox system, owned by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October.
Guidelines from Twitter to define state-affiliated accounts as “points of sale where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial means, direct or indirect political pressure, and/or control over production and distribution.” Other news media accounts labeled include RT from Russia and Xinhua from China.
According to cached versions of Twitter’s published policy, for much of Tuesday the guidelines noted that NPR and Britain’s BBC did not receive the label because they were “state-funded media organizations with editorial independence”. The reference to NPR has been since then removed from that policy.
“We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as ‘state-affiliated media,'” John Lansing, NPR’s CEO, said in a statement. “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us that way,” he added.
Isabel Lara, NPR’s head of communications, said the broadcaster was not notified that the label would be added to her account and only learned of the change when it appeared on Twitter. She added that NPR had reached out to Twitter and had heard nothing. She noted that, on average, less than 1 percent of NPR’s annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies and departments.
Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment, and an email to Twitter’s communications department was returned with an auto-reply of a poop emoji. Mr Musk tweeted in support of the move, posting a passage from Twitter’s policy saying it “appears to be right” in a reply to a user pointing out the label on NPR’s account.
As of Wednesday night, NPR’s subaccounts on Twitter, including those covering politics, music, and health, were not labeled “US state-affiliated media.”
Mr. Musk announced last year that he would remove the checkmarks, which indicated the accounts of celebrities, politicians and other notable figures, from the profiles of many users unless they paid an $8 monthly fee for the verification program known as as Twitter Blue. While the changes were supposed to go into effect on Saturday, most verified users kept their blue check marks.
Twitter unchecked some accounts, including the main New York Times account. After Twitter users pointed out that The Times was among the media companies, including The Washington Post and Politico, that said they would not pay for ticks, Mr. Musk tweeted that he would remove it.
