National Public Radio has been caught up in the Twitter verification-system overhaul and some new company-administered labels that have riled users of the social media platform since Tesla and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk took over the platform last fall.
NPR was wrongly labeled Tuesday as “U.S. state-affiliated media” on the social network, according to its chief executive and correspondents — a move that contradicts Twitter’s previously held definition of the term. The label now appears on NPR’s primary Twitter bio and all of the tweets from NPR’s primary Twitter account, similar to missives from the accounts of foreign outlets, including the network RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik radio, owned and operated by the Russian government, and China’s Xinhua News Agency, which is similarly state-run.
Independent nonprofit NPR, in contrast, gets a minuscule amount of its funding from government grants and retains editorial independence.
