NPR Says Enough Is Enough: Quits Twitter

The only surprising thing here is that it took this long: NPR has officially announced that it has quit Twitter. This is in response to Elon’s chaotic decision to first label the account “state-affiliated media,” a label that was designed to help users understand if a media organization was actually a dedicated mouthpiece of the government (which NPR is not). Indeed, NPR was initially the example that Twitter used as to the types of media organizations that such a label should not apply to.

After receiving some pushback for this, and revealing his near total lack of intellectual curiosity on the matter, Musk agreed to change the label to “government funded media,” despite that being misleading as well (and again, it seems that such a label would apply just as much to Twitter itself).

NPR had stopped posting to its main Twitter account after the initial label was made, and on Wednesday morning announced that it was leaving for good:

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.

The reasoning, explained by NPR CEO John Lansing, is about more than just the label, but about how the label came to be:

“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.”

Meanwhile, Musk’s willingness to just make shit up as he goes along without thinking through the consequences of said labeling was on display in an interview he gave to the BBC, in which he said he’ll probably change the label on NPR, the BBC and other similarly situated news orgs as “publicly funded.”

It’s unclear how that will win back anyone.

Meanwhile, the NPR Twitter account did wake from its weeklong slumber to basically tell everyone the many other places you should go to get NPR info that are not Twitter.

So Musk’s whims are now going to drive more people to following NPR on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Considering that Twitter’s biggest advantage over those other sites was that people used Twitter to follow news, this seems like a pretty massive self-own by Musk.