A label was added to NPR’s Twitter account Tuesday calling the company “U.S. state-affiliated media.” Twitter CEO Elon Musk later quoted a passage from Twitter’s Help Center reading: “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” “Seems accurate,” Musk captioned a screenshot of the passage in response to a tweet pointing out that the label had been applied to NPR. He apparently ignored the paragraph in the Help Center’s policy page specifically citing NPR as a “state-financed” media organization with editorial independence, which should not fall under the labeling policy. The label, which has been applied to the accounts of state-affiliated outlets like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua, comes after Musk stripped The New York Times’ Twitter account of its verified checkmark after the newspaper refused to pay for it.
