NPR Getting Out Of The Twitter Business
• NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries. CEO John Lansing slammed that designation as “unacceptable.”
Twitter then revised its label on NPR’s account to “government-funded media,” the same label it recently attached to PBS and the BBC. In an interview with the BBC posted online Wednesday, Musk suggested he may further change the label to “publicly funded.” NPR says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence which receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In a statement, Lansing said, “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. 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.”
Lansing added that even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, the network will not immediately return to the platform. “At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he says. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
For now, NPR is instituting a “two-week grace period” so the staff who run the Twitter accounts can revise their social-media strategies. Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter.
On Wednesday, in what may be its final post (for now, at least), the organization said, “NPR produces consequential, independent journalism every day in service to the public,” and detailed other ways that supporters could stay connected, including a list of other social media platforms.
