Twitter Removes Government Funded Labels from NPR

RADIO ONLINE | Friday, April 21, 2023

National Public Radio

Twitter has stopped labeling all media organizations as "state-affiliated" and/or "government-funded," including NPR, which exited the platform over how it was labeled. The social media platform removed all labels for several media accounts on Thursday night, dropping NPR's "government-funded" label along with the "state-affiliated" identifier for other foreign outlets.

At the beginning of April, Twitter added "state-affiliated media" to NPR's official account. NPR stated that label was misleading as it receives less than 1% of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting and does not publish news at the government's direction.

"It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards," NPR CEO John Lansing wrote in an email to staff regarding the decision to leave.

No word on if and when NPR will return to the platform.