Twitter removed a label designating NPR as a “US state affiliated” news outlet. just days after applying the label for the first time earlier this week. As of Saturday, the company now lists the public broadcaster as a “government-funded” organization. npr Technical reporter Bobby Allyn was the first to report on the change. He said Elon Musk told him that Twitter would apply the “government-funded” designation to other institutions in the coming days. “Tesla, which has received billions of dollars in government subsidies over the years, doesn’t seem to have the label,” .
NEW: The tag on NPR’s main account has been changed to “government funded,” and Elon tells me that Twitter is “applying it to a greater number of institutions.”
—Bobby Allyn (@BobbyAllyn) April 8, 2023
NPR’s main account has not tweeted since Twitter first applied the state affiliate label on Wednesday. After NPR CEO John Lansing issued a statement noting that “state affiliate” did not apply to the public broadcaster under Twitter’s guidelines, the company changed those guidelines. “State-funded media organizations with editorial independence, such as the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media,” the page said before Tuesday. By Wednesday, the company had removed the section of text that referenced NPR. , less than one percent of its annual operating budget comes from government grants. Over the past five years, most of the nonprofit’s revenue, about 70 percent, has come from corporate sponsorships and programming fees.
