Elon Musk Threatens to Reassign NPR's Twitter Account

RADIO ONLINE | Wednesday, May 3, 2023

National Public Radio

According to NPR, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has threatened to reassign its Twitter account to "another company." In a series of emails sent to NPR Bobby Allyn, Musk said he would transfer the network's main account with 9 million followers on Twitter, @NPR, to another organization or person. "Handing over established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company's reputation," social media experts told NPR.

"If this is a sign of things to come on Twitter, we might soon see even more of a rapid retreat by media organizations and other brands that don't think it's worth the risk," said Emily Bell, a professor at Columbia Journalism School who studies social media told NPR. "It's really an extraordinary threat to make."

Last month, NPR stopped posting to Twitter after Musk applied a label to the news organization's account that NPR said falsely suggested it was state-controlled. Other public media organizations, including PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., followed suit and stopped tweeting following similar labeling.

Musk has since removed the labels, but the the outlets targeted have not resumed public activity on Twitter, prompting Musk to ponder: "should we reassign @NPR to another company?"

NPR reports that under Twitter's terms of service, an account's inactivity is based on logging in, not tweeting. Those rules state that an account must be logged into at least every 30 days, and that "prolonged inactivity" can result in it being permanently removed.

NPR CEO John Lansing has previously said he lost faith with "decision-making at Twitter," and that more time is needed in order to determine if Twitter can be trusted again." A spokeswoman for NPR declined to comment further.