From DD News to NPR: Leading news outlets no longer labelled ‘state-funded’ on Twitter

A day after deleting blue ticks from legacy accounts, Twitter dropped its labels from several news accounts that designate them as “government funded” or “publicly funded”.

For instance, BBC, RT and NPR no longer carry these labels on the social networking website. Xinhua News is also no longer designated as “China state-affiliate media”. BBC confirmed its label disappeared sometime today.

In India, DD News and several others had been designated “state-affiliated media” too – those labels have now vanished.

Twitter’s decision to add these labels to BBC and NPR, for instance, had led to an outcry earlier this month. The BBC, labelled “government-funded media”, asserted that it was funded by the British public and said it was “speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible”. The later was later modified to “publicly funded”.

American nonprofit NPR announced it would no longer post new content on its 52 official Twitter feeds after being designated as “state-affiliated media”, later modified to “government-affiliated media”. Its CEO John Lansing issued a statement saying, “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility. At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter.”

It should be remembered that when he took over, Twitter CEO Elon Musk suspended multiple journalists from Twitter, even suspending the Twitter accounts of social media competitor Mastodon. Read all about his so-called “free speech project” here.