State-Affiliated Tweets
It’s been a roller-coaster since Elon Musk took over Twitter. People who had been blocked have been let back on, he’s had journalists review memos showing the prior management had conspired with Democrats to support their message and limit other political messages, it’s now worth only half of what he paid for it, etc.
He even kept one promise and—for a time—changed the Twitter bird logo to that of a dog…specifically, a shiba inu, the mascot of dogecoin.
One label put on a certain account last week was a jab at those who have spoken out against him…namely, on NPR, which used to stand for “National Public Radio” and now just stands for NPR.
Twitter started labeling NPR “state-affiliated media” due to the fact that a large portion of its funding comes from the federal government through the taxes we pay. Yes, it’s funneled through something called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but that’s the conduit…NPR gets federal money.
NPR resisted, since that “state-affiliated media” handle is something also used on government-owned Chinese and Russian media platforms. Given the overt leaning of NPR, you might say the designation fits…and I think that’s sort of what Musk’s Twitter was getting at.
Quietly over the weekend, however, the designation was changed from “state-affiliated media” to “government-funded”–and in the process, added the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, which is funded predominantly by British households paying a license fee. The BBC, no doubt wondering what they did to get in the middle of this, has asked for a clarification from Twitter.
In response to all this, NPR stopped tweeting last Tuesday…and as of this morning, they haven’t been back.
Musk has not been shy about his criticism for the traditional news media; lately, he also installed an automatic reply of a poop emoji to emails sent to Twitter’s main press inquiry address.
You can’t say it hasn’t been interesting since he bought Twitter.
