Twitter has branded NPR with the "state-affiliated media" tag applied to news organizations controlled by governments, contradicting a Twitter policy that cites NPR as an example of a state-financed media organization that retains editorial independence.

The move continues Twitter-owner Elon Musk's feud with media organizations. He publicly endorsed the new label for NPR, claiming the outlet falls under policy language that defines state-affiliated media "as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content."

The NPR Twitter account is now labeled "US state-affiliated media," similar to how RT and Xinhua are labeled "Russia state-affiliated media" and "China state-affiliated media." That move contradicted Twitter's own policy on labeling government or state-affiliated media accounts, which said:

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.

Twitter deleted "or NPR in the US" from that line of the policy, apparently doing so shortly after a Washington Post reporter pointed out last night that "Twitter branding @NPR 'state-affiliated media' literally conflicts with its own policy." Twitter removed NPR from the policy sometime after 2:34 am UTC today, Internet Archive captures show.

Twitter not thorough in scrubbing policy

But Twitter wasn't very thorough in scrubbing NPR from its guidelines. There's another Twitter help page that describes the policy and as of today still contains the same language stating that "the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media." The BBC's Twitter accounts have not been labeled as state-affiliated media.

When contacted by Ars today, NPR said, "This must be a mistake as it contradicts Twitter's own guidelines. We have reached out to Twitter to have the label removed."

But Musk appeared to confirm that the change was a deliberate response to right-wing media personality Benny Johnson, who was once fired from BuzzFeed for 41 instances of plagiarism. Johnson got a reply from Musk today after posting a screenshot of NPR's state-affiliated media tag and writing, "GET REKT @NPR… Nicely done, @elonmusk 🤣."

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Musk replied to Johnson, "Seems accurate," and included a screenshot from a news story quoting this language from Twitter's policy:

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.

NPR describes itself as "an independent, non-profit media organization," with most of its funding coming from "corporate sponsorships and fees paid by NPR Member organizations." Federal funding indirectly contributes to a large chunk of NPR's revenue because the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides annual grants to public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.

Twitter's "state-affiliated media" tag has an impact on how many people see an account's tweets. "In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people," the company policy says.

Musk’s feud with media

The NPR labeling occurred days after Twitter revoked The New York Times' verification badge over the paper stating publicly that it won't pay Twitter's new $1,000-per-month charge for businesses. The NYT lost verification even though the badge hasn't yet been pulled from other accounts that don't pay due to a grace period that Musk said would last a few weeks "unless they tell [us] they won't pay now." Musk also wrote, "The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn't even interesting," and "their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It's unreadable."

Musk may have similar thoughts about NPR. Yesterday afternoon, he replied with an exclamation point to a tweet criticizing NPR for describing European right-wing politicians as "lobbing a conspiracy theory that elites want people to eat bugs."

Another tweet in the thread, though not the tweet that Musk responded to, said that "NPR thinks people don't like eating bugs because we are racist colonizers" and that "NPR is worse than the propaganda of Maoist schoolchildren during the cultural revolution."

Update at 1:43 pm ET: NPR published an article calling the state-affiliated media label untrue. "NPR operates independently of the US government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1 percent of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources," the article said.

An NPR spokesperson was quoted as saying that Twitter made the change without notifying NPR. "We were not warned. It happened quite suddenly last night," a spokesperson said. NPR CEO John Lansing called it "unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy."