Here is NPR's original response
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...
No. As the article you linked to notes, the problem is that Musk's label was designed to suggest that NPR is state-controlled media rather than the independent non-profit that they are.
And of course, Musk doesn't apply the label to his companies, which have received billions in government funding and support.
It didn't help that Musk encouraged his Muskovites to attack NPR while this played out.
All of this is a distraction from the point of the story, which is that being on X is virtually worthless for brands.
which of his government-funded companies are media companies such that a "State-Sponsored Media" label would be warranted?
This is assuming that the benefit is from instantaneous rather than long-term conversions, which is more likely to not be the case for something like a media outlet.
How you get users from something like Twitter is when other people retweet your stuff so it gets discovered by people who aren't already familiar with you. For established outlets that happens regardless of whether you have an official account. Maybe it happens less because Twitter users might have followed the official account and then seen and retweeted more stuff. But even there what you're really after is discovery to gain more long-term listeners, which isn't going to show up as a short-term effect anyway.
Assuming that Musk/Twitter aren't surreptitiously limiting the reach of media outlets he doesn't like, like they did with the NYT[1]. Ironic, how Musk accused Publicly listed Twitter of "shadow banning" during the manufacturer "Twitter files" fiasco. Long term conversions isn't something media outlets can bank on on Twitter.
1. https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-appears-throttle-york-times-0...
The real test is if Musk will get it to stop doing that. How long does that take in a large bureaucracy full of legacy code and potentially hostile employees? Plausibly longer than he's controlled the company.
> Long term conversions isn't something media outlets can bank on on Twitter.
Long-term conversions don't need the platform to like you tomorrow. That's what makes them long-term. Once they know you exist they keep coming back to your own service.
Isn't that precisely what I pointed out in my comment?
> In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter's decision to first label the network "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
The reason NPR didn't like that label is that it was applied to them in a way that directly compared them to those propaganda outlets.
Also from that story:
> Twitter's own guidelines previously said, "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
It looks like Twitter re-instated that policy - that text now appears on this page: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia...
Wow, I thought I had clicked through to the wrong article because there are so many paragraphs that are seemingly unrelated to the headline. Also, Cory seems to have fudged the facts a bit, since NPR's move didn't have "no effect" as he claimed. It had a "negligible" impact, according to NiemanReports. [1]
Is this nitpicking? Yes. But when you choose a headline that misrepresents the facts (even those you present in your article, many paragraphs down), then it's appropriate.
NiemanReports' article also has some enlightening data regarding the magnitude of the impact.
> A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped
So if less than 2% of the total traffic came from Twitter previously, and the total traffic has since dropped by 1%, that means that by removing their account they lost more than half of their Twitter-sourced traffic.
For a publisher like NPR, which had minimal Twitter-sourced traffic in the first place, that isn't too big a deal. But it means that other publishers shouldn't hastily delete their Twitter accounts, thinking that their traffic won't drop materially. If NPR's experience is representative, a publisher should expect to lose just over half of their Twitter-sourced traffic if they delete their account.
Total spend by the CFB is a whole $1.40/yr per person, and the lion's share of that goes to PBS, not NPR.
If the 1% number NPR touts was real, they should advocate for the disbandment of CPB so their independence would be undisputed, but they live on that money so they don't.
Does that make Tesla a government funded company? Should Tesla be given state-sponsored flags on Twitter?
The reason car companies don't get the "state sponsored media" flag isn't that they're not state sponsored, it's that they're not media organizations.
"Do we need support for gas stations? We don't," Musk said. "There's no need for support for a charging network. I would delete it. Delete."
They're not owned by GE anymore though. They're owned by Comcast, which... maybe it should still get the tag.
Calling (2) "state-funded" when the signal was clearly intended to indicate (1) is disingenuous and eliminates the value of the signal.
What's the point? Nobody thinks that the Musk fans attacking NPR are arguing in good faith. No matter what NPR does they will keep finding reasons to attack it, unless Elon says otherwise. Intellectual consistency is about last way to describe Musk's flailing changes over at twitter, yet his diehard fans always defend them.
The US does have a state media news org. It's called Voice of America. They have a youtube channel.
(Spoiler: government advertising pays significantly more of the budget of a great many commercial and "independent" radio stations)
Words need to matter. You could call this Federally funded media - but he didn't .. And like others have said funny he didn't label Tesla or Space X state sponsored car company. They are (and should be imo) This was just playing politics.
And yeah sure, they weren't directly funded but that's semantics. The stations, which constitute NPR are state funded. It's such a weird position to deny something like this, it just exposes your biases (aka, the label was never meant to be factual but mostly to be a smear)