The media organisation’s main Twitter account, under the handle @NPR, has 8.8 million followers.
Billionaire Elon Musk-owned social media platform Twitter has managed to stay in the regular limelight since the change of ownership last year. This time Musk has threatened to reassign the Twitter account of U.S.-based National Public Radio, commonly called NPR, to another user.
The American media organization said yesterday that Musk has sent a series of emails to a reporter saying that he would transfer the network’s main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person. One such email from the billionaire read “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?”
To give a background, some media organizations including NPR stopped posting on Twitter last month in protest against the microblogging platform that suggested the involvement of the government in its editorial content. America’s Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC, had also stopped tweeting following similar labeling.
It is noteworthy that Musk has removed the label suggesting that media organizations are state-funded/controlled. But the targeted outlets have not resumed public activity. Last month, NPR said it is “turning away from Twitter” and will not post new content across its 52 accounts on the microblogging platform.
NPR’s last Tweet was on April 12 and the account has 8.8 million followers. NPR Politics, another NPR account that reports on politics, policy, government, and more and has nearly 3 million followers, had also stopped posting from April 12. PBS had stopped posting since April 8 and CBC last retweeted on April 18.
“Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant,” Musk said in another email. “Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR,” it added.
The media company, citing social media experts, said that such a handover of established Twitter accounts to third parties could cause serious risk of impersonation and hamper a company’s reputation.
Meanwhile, according to Twitter’s policy, users should log in to their accounts once in at least 30 days or the company could permanently remove such accounts due to “prolonged inactivity.” NPR highlighted that the inactivity of an account is based on logging in and not tweeting. Satirically, the media organization added that Musk did not respond to if he planned to change the platform’s definition of inactivity.
Musk bought Twitter in October last year for $44 billion. Following the takeover, the Blue Bird has managed to garner regular headlines about its weakening content moderation policies, a surge in fake accounts, re-activation of accounts of some controversial celebrities, and its cost-cutting measures including mass layoffs.
Last month, in an interview with BBC, Musk admitted that he went with the Twitter acquisition deal only because he “kind of had to” and believed that he would be forced by the court anyway. Musk, who also heads Tesla and SpaceX, said that running the microblogging company has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster.”
