PBS

NPR announced its departure from Twitter on Wednesday, marking the first notable news organization to do so since Mr. Elon Musk’s turbulent acquisition of the social media site.

The departure ends a week-long controversy over Twitter’s choice to identify NPR as “state-affiliated media,” designating it similarly to big media organizations in totalitarian nations like Russia or China.

Popular in the United States, NPR already stopped tweeting from its primary account as it awaited Twitter to reverse course. Twitter only achieved this by changing NPR’s label to “government-funded media,” something it also did for the BBC in the United Kingdom.

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Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has criticized NPR’s reliance on US government financing, despite the fact that just a small portion of the Washington-based organization’s income comes from federal agencies.

All of NPR’s organizational accounts “will no longer be active on Twitter,” the organization announced in a brief statement because “Twitter is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”

It continued, “There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR’s news, music, and cultural content”, urging readers to alternative platforms that it then provided links for in a final tweet.

Mr. Musk has long stated his intense dislike for the news industry, and he recently added an automated poop emoji response to emails from journalists. News organizations have had a difficult time weaning themselves from the network, which continues to be a major forum for dialogue among politicians, pundits, and public figures.

NPR’s journalists and affiliate radio stations “will be able to decide on their own if they want to stay on the platform,” an NPR official told Agence France-Presse. NPR left the platform just hours after Elon Musk said in a BBC interview on Tuesday that he would think about changing the designation to “publicly funded” because the original choice of the label was erroneous.

He also commented on Twitter’s contentious decision to remove The New York Times’ blue verification mark after the publication declined to pay to preserve it.

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Starting on April 20, all legacy verified Twitter accounts that were established to be authentic under the previous management of the company will have to pay to join Twitter Blue. Mr. Musk stated that he did not want Twitter to support “some anointed class of journalists” who decide what counts as news as one of the reasons for this.

Elon Musk bought the social media network for $44 billion last year and has since made significant changes, including getting rid of the verification process for the press, celebrities, and other well-known Twitter users.