After National Public Radio said it would no longer post new content to its 52 official Twitter accounts, Elon Musk proposed defunding the news organization.
“Defund NPR,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
The US state-sponsored media network National Public Radio announced on Wednesday that it is ceasing its activity on the social media platform Twitter after the site labeled NPR as “US state-affiliated media” and more recently “government-funded media.”
The prior label had typically been applied to Twitter accounts of state media outlets in non-Western countries such as China and Russia that were accused of lacking editorial independence.
NPR was founded following the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which issued the congressional corporate charter for NPR’s parent organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Twitter also flagged the accounts of the BBC as "state-funded media."
In 2020, Twitter's administration reported that it had begun tagging media pages that it believed were under the control of authorities, as well as the accounts of authorities of permanent members of the UN Security Council, key government officials, including foreign ministers, ambassadors, official representatives, and major diplomatic leaders.