National Public Radio said on Wednesday that it would suspend all Twitter use, a little over a week after the social network designated the broadcaster “U.S. state-affiliated media.”
Twitter has since changed the label on the NPR Twitter account to “Government-funded Media,” a label it also gave to the BBC, the national broadcaster of Britain.
“NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” Isabel Lara, NPR’s chief communications officer, said in a statement.
“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” she added.
In a letter to staff Wednesday morning, John Lansing, NPR’s chief executive, wrote, “Actions by Twitter or other social media companies to tarnish the independence of any public media institution are exceptionally harmful and set a dangerous precedent.”
In a Twitter thread Wednesday morning, the broadcaster shared links to its newsletters and other social media sites.
In the past, Twitter had listed NPR and BBC as exceptions to its guidelines on state-affiliated accounts because they were “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence.”
Ms. Lara said last week that, on average, NPR received less than 1 percent of its annual operating budget in the form of grants from the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies and departments.
Other media outlets have suspended their Twitter accounts in the past. In 2018, Fox News stopped tweeting for 16 months after the home address of the prime-time host Tucker Carlson was posted on the site.
