Twitter singles NPR out with deceptive state-backed media label
After taking on final yr, Twitter’s new proprietor has invented insurance policies on the fly, pushed questionable design modifications and customarily bent the platform to swimsuit his whims.
Within the newest installment of Elon Musk’s mercurial management saga, Twitter now classifies American information nonprofit NPR the identical approach that it handles RT, the notorious Russian state-backed mouthpiece that pushes the Kremlin’s speaking factors to the broader world.
Picture Credit: NPR
NPR’s Twitter account on the once-essential breaking information platform now comes with a tag denoting it as “US state-affiliated media.” However NPR would not meet Twitter’s own definition for a state-affiliated account:
State-affiliated media is outlined as shops the place the state workout routines management over editorial content material via monetary sources, direct or oblique political pressures, and/or management over manufacturing and distribution…
State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, just like the BBC within the UK for instance, will not be outlined as state-affiliated media for the needs of this coverage.
NPR, which operates with editorial independence, is not managed by the U.S. authorities. And the information group solely acquired about 1% of its finances from federal funding in 2020.
The choice, which seems to have come out of the blue, could have as a lot to do with Elon Musk’s failure to know the media because it does his tendency to settle scores by altering Twitter’s guidelines and capabilities.
Primarily based on Musk’s prior assaults on the press, it is attainable that NPR has some unflattering investigative protection of the tech mogul lined up. Nevertheless it’s simply as seemingly that Musk is simply flexing his affect to appease his followers and the upstart right-wing media shops that he has repeatedly aligned himself with.
Simply previous to waging struggle with NPR, Musk took goal at The New York Occasions. Twitter’s customers waited with bated breath over the weekend in anticipation, ready for the directive that each one “legacy” test marks be stripped from beforehand verified accounts to come back to move. However legacy blue checks survived the weekend with one notable exception: The New York Occasions. Musk apparently revoked the NYT’s blue test himself after studying that the paper did not have plans to pay for his ill-conceived new pay-for-play verification service.
Musk’s disdain for conventional information media was a significant animating consider his determination to purchase Twitter to start with. And as Twitter decays into an disagreeable slurry of stale jokes, amplified hate and paid prominence, Musk will seemingly proceed to control the social community to his personal ends, proper up till the wheels fall off or all of us cease paying consideration.
