Twitter Quitely Changes Policy To Slap NPR With State-Affiliated Media Label – SlashGear

By the previous definition, one could argue that NPR scantly meets those qualifications despite its earnest attempts to explain that its journalistic process is completely independent. But NPR is widely accepted as a non-biased, trusted source of information typically devoid of any far-leaning agenda outside its goal to spread the truth. NPR also reminds the public that it receives most of its funding from sponsorships and fees from member and affiliate stations that are also part of the state-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It suggests that the federal funding it receives helps supports those stations and that the stations themselves are not obligated to license content exclusively from NPR.

Before the change, Twitter’s website used NPR alongside the U.K.’s BBC as an example of a state-financed media organization that doesn’t cross the now-blurred line into state-affiliated media. At the time of writing, that help document has been updated to remove NPR from the example provided, leaving only BBC. For what it’s worth, Facebook also labels state-affiliated media, and NPR has received no such designation there. Funnily enough, Voice of America — a state-sponsored media station that publicly admits it’s fully operated by the U.S. Agency for Global Media and funded by U.S. Congress — doesn’t have such a mark on its Twitter account.