Elon Musk's Twitter incorrectly labels NPR 'state-affiliated'

Twitter's attacks on NPR shows no signs of stopping.

Last week, billionaire Elon Musk-owned Twitter slapped a "state-affiliated media" label on NPR's Twitter account, despite NPR not being a candidate for such a label according to Twitter's own definition of the term. Twitter's Help Center specifically singled out NPR as an example of a corporation that wouldn't meet the definition.

"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy," the Help Center document said.

Musk, however, Twitter's owner and CEO, responded to a tweet about the new "state-affiliated" label, saying, "Seems accurate."

After news pieces pointed out that Twitter's own Help Center said NPR didn't meet the definition, Twitter deleted the use of NPR as its Help Center example rather than admitting they weren't following their own rules. NPR itself expressed outrage that Musk was falsely lumping it in with the foreign state-sponsored propaganda outlets that the Twitter label is meant to warn users about and announced that they'd no longer be posting on Musk's site until the label was removed.

NPR receives fewer than one percent of its annual budget from federal government sources, according to its website.

"NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable," NPR CEO John Lansing said in a statement. "It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy."

Yoel Roth, who led Twitter's trust and safety department for seven years, criticized Twitter's decision to relabel NPR. Roth resigned from Twitter last year.

"Twitter's decision to label NPR as a state media outlet flies in the face of years of research, all evidence about NPR's funding and governance, and Twitter's own policies and principles," Roth told NPR. "Establishing a false equivalency between public broadcasters and editorial control of media by government is misleading, and undermines the essential work of providing transparency about state-backed propaganda efforts around the world."

Twitter's decision to label NPR state-affiliated may have impact on how visible its content is on the platform. The social media platform's policy says, "In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people."

Faced with criticism, Twitter engineers changed NPR's designation to read "Government Funded Media."

NPR is not "state-affiliated" or materially "government funded." NPR is a nonprofit corporation that gets somewhere around one percent of its funding from government grants and relies on donations, grants, and station dues for the rest. As politicians have groused repeatedly over the years, the federal government has no ability to dictate NPR's news coverage.