Last month, National Public Radio (NPR) announced it was leaving Twitter, thanks to new owner Elon Musk labelling the account as “state-affiliated media”. Now, the broadcaster has revealed that Musk emailed yesterday, saying it might reallocate the @NPR username if it doesn’t resume tweeting.
“So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?,” Musk reportedly emailed.
This, as NPR surmises, is akin to a threat — and one that will alarm other media organisations on Twitter. The site already has huge problems with impersonation, thanks to its bungled introduction of blue tick verification for all paying accounts. The idea that long-standing accounts could be given away to others may make companies think twice about making Twitter a big part of their social media marketing.
Musk justified the question by highlighting his interpretation of Twitter’s policy: “To recycle handles that are definitively dormant.” He added that there would be “no special treatment for NPR”.
But that’s a simplification of what the policy actually says. Twitter’s terms of service say that inactivity is based on logging in, not tweeting. And even if it were based on tweets rather than logins, it would be inadvisable to recycle brand names to anybody who wants them for fairly obvious trust reasons.
When asked what account could receive the handle, Musk apparently replied “National Pumpkin Radio” alongside fire and laughing emoji, showing his off-beat brand of humour isn’t merely confined to tweets. "NPR isn’t tagged as government-funded anymore, so what’s the beef?" he added.
As most independently-minded observers agreed, NPR’s state-affiliated label was absurd. It put the not-for-profit news organisation in the same league as Russian propaganda network RT and China’s Xinhua News Agency. This was despite NPR receiving just 1 per cent of its funding from the US government and being independent in a way that genuine state-affiliated media is not.
Indeed, Twitter’s own guidelines previously highlighted NPR as an exception to labelling, thanks to its editorial independence. When this was highlighted on Twitter at the time, the page was quickly amended to remove the mention of NPR.
The broadcaster — along with other news organisations similarly mislabelled such as PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — announced it would no longer be tweeting as a result of the misleading label.
Musk eventually backed down, removing all media labels, including those run by the Russian and Chinese states — a boon to actual state-run media. An investigation from Semafor last month found that Twitter was no longer limiting the reach of propaganda networks either, though both RT and Sputnik are blocked in the UK and Europe “in response to a legal demand”.
