Elon Musk’s attempt this week to delegitimize NPR by labeling the public media’s primary Twitter account “US state-affiliated media” is an outright troll move that will further degrade Twitter’s value to its users and its advertisers.
Why? How? NPR has a weekly audience of 46 million people across its many platforms, including those who consume its vast content by listening to its broadcast radio programs and its many podcasts, who stream content and read digital stories. It has 8.8 million followers on Twitter alone. NPR’s reputation among these consumers is already solidified and will not be affected by a label on a social media platform that most news consumers do not use.
No one in their right mind could legitimately argue that NPR is an arm of the U.S. government. NPR and many other media outlets have clearly made that point. NPR is a nonprofit news organization with an oversight board, publicly available tax documents and independent editorial decision-making structure. It gets less than 1% of funds directly from the federal government.
I serve as NPR’s Public Editor and can declare without reservation that whenever NPR falls short, it’s because the decision-making process fails, not because its journalists are doing the government’s bidding. In fact, most people in favor of Twitter keeping the state-affiliated media label seem to be arguing that NPR has a political agenda, which it does not. But even if it did, having a political agenda would make a newsroom party-affiliated, not state affiliated.
Twitter has traditionally used the state-affiliated media label to identify official government mouthpieces and propaganda outlets from countries like Russia and China.
Appending the label to NPR will not do anything to harm NPR’s credibility. Instead it signals to Twitter’s users that the social media company’s judgment is rooted in an illogical and thus worthless value system.
Because the casual user can no longer rely on Twitter to signal a state actor, she either has to leave Twitter to sort through the truth or just learn to live without it. The whole point of a walled garden (the idea that users don’t need to surf the entire web and could instead stay on one social media site) was to keep the users on the site by giving them everything they need.
Now, if you scroll through your feed and see something interesting from an account like RT (Russia Today) or CGTN (China Global Television News), you may note the “state-affiliated” label, it no longer means anything. Or rather it could signal one of two things: A) This really is state media or B) This is someone Musk has beef with.
This new duality renders the label useless, making Twitter that much less valuable.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that Musk slapped the label on NPR hours after the network ran a segment on its afternoon magazine program, “All Things Considered,” that explained it would not carry former President Donald Trump’s post-arraignment press conference live. Musk has been cozy with Trump and reinstated the former president’s Twitter account when he bought the platform.
Or maybe not. Who knows? Twitter is illogical.
We see this ethical degradation of environments all the time. When stated values are applied unevenly or according to a hidden agenda, the values themselves become meaningless.
Ask any high schooler whether enforcing dress code violations improves the school’s learning environment. Mysterious or incoherent systems create spaces where you only go if you have to.
Twitter’s been on this path since Musk purchased it, randomly banning users, giving blue checks to paying customers and taking them away from actual verified users, and now labeling a legitimate news media organization an agent of the state.
It’s not really a problem for NPR. It’s a problem for Twitter.
I think its worth noting that alongside all of the commentary about Twitter and the new Supreme Leader, there is an underlying story that conflicts in wierd ways with His Holiness’ purported ideological shift…. Twitter is currently being…. I’m not sure what the correct adjective is…. “flooded” with an ever increasing number of “NSFW” (pornographic) content, especially with regard to the burgeoning field of “simulated” pornography (“cartoons” aka Hentai, “photorealistic” aka 3D, etc.). This is timely because a large subcomponent of this trend is built on Adversarial Generative Machine Learning systems that generate art based on human text input.
In addition, there is a significant subcomponent that is composed of “refugees” who have “fled” each of the various content creator monetization platforms (Patreon, Subscribestar, Onlyfans, various “Art specific” platforms, etc) as each and every platform, literally to a 1, have to face the threats of financial ruin due to the “Mastercard effect” where they each engage in a pogrom of content creators who skirt the line of allowable or acceptability, usually defined by the Payment Processor’s and not actual laws.
Its ironic, given that a mere 19 years ago, the religious right was celebrating the inclusion of laws that would have penalized artistic/simulated/drawn material containing pornographic content as severely as actual child abuse material
This type of content is now multiple digits of Twitter “by weight” so to speak.