This Week in Apps: Newsrooms leave Twitter

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Finally, finally, newsrooms leave Twitter

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

This week was one of the more interesting ones for Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover, as multiple newsrooms finally had enough of Elon Musk’s antics. AfterMusk labeled NPR and others as “state-affiliated media”— a label previously reserved for state propaganda accounts, like the Kremlin-backed Russia Today and China’s Xinhua — NPR and PBS havestoppedtweeting.

After backlash to NPR’s new label, Twitter shifted to a newly made-up designation,“government-funded media.”

In addition to NPR, the news organizations PBS and the BBC received the new labels as well. The BBC objected, too, and Twitter changed its label to “publicly funded” instead. (PBS and NPR remain labeled as “government-funded” as of the time of writing.)

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Musk’s capricious decision to lump independent news organizations alongside state-supported propaganda accounts is both misleading and dangerous. NPR, for instance, receives “less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” PBS receives more of its funding from the public and philanthropic organizations than it does from the small amount it gets from government subsidies.

More importantly — unlike in state regimes where government officials heavily influence the spread of information to the people — NPR and PBS are editorially independent.

Whether you like the nature of their reporting is, of course, a subjective matter.But an objectiveanalysis puts the two in the middle of theAd Fontes media bias chart.