NPR quits Twitter over ‘government-funded’ tag, Elon Musk calls them ‘hypocrites’

American nonprofit National Public Radio or NPR will no longer post new content on its 52 official Twitter feeds. NPR said the decision was taken after Twitter labelled it as “state-affiliated media”, later modified to “government-affiliated media”.

NPR quoted its CEO John Lansing as saying: “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility. At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter.”

Twitter has previously applied this label to news organisations like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua News. Earlier this week, it labelled the BBC as government-funded too, prompting the British broadcaster to assert that it’s funded by the British public. In a subsequent interview with the BBC, Twitter CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the label would be changed to “publicly funded”.

In NPR’s case, the nonprofit has said it’s “inaccurate and misleading” to describe it as government-funded media since NPR receives “less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting”.

Musk called them “hypocrites” for previously saying federal funding is “essential to public service radio”.

As NPR detailed in its statement, most of its funding comes from “corporate and individual supporters and grants” as well as “significant programming fees” from member stations. “Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.”

NPR’s last tweet was links to its newsletter, app and other social media accounts.