According to the Twitter, a “state-affiliated media” designation is placed on government media accounts and used to “provide additional context for accounts heavily engaged in geopolitics and diplomacy.” That means Twitter labels China’s Xinhau and Russia’s RT as “state affiliated media.”
Now NPR has the label on its profile and on every tweet, too, as “US state-affiliated media.”
Elon Musk shared a screenshot of the Twitter policy and captioned it, “Seems accurate.”
“The label appears on the profile page of the relevant Twitter account and on the Tweets sent by and shared from these accounts. Labels contain information about the country the account is affiliated with and whether it is operated by a government representative or state-affiliated media entity,” Twitter’s policy says.
Twitter defines government-affiliated media, without the “US addition” as “senior officials and entities that are the official voice of the nation state abroad.”
NPR gets its government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives grants from different federal agencies and passes them through. NPRs budget for this fiscal year is over $300 million. Its audience, according to a poll by the Pew Charitable Trust, is largely Democrat. A 2019 survey found that 87% of NPR’s audience identified as Democrats, or leaning Democratic, and 12% were Republicans or leaning Republican.
