By Abigail Olear
On April 12, NPR announced it would no longer post new content to its 52 Twitter official accounts.
“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” NPR said in a statement.
Later the same week, PBS followed suit, leaving over 2.2 million followers’ feeds devoid of new content.
“PBS’ editorial independence is central to our work and will never change. We produce trustworthy content that features unbiased reporting,” reads the organization’s current Twitter bio.
Twitter labeled these trusted news outlets as “government-funded media,” prompting them to leave the platform. NPR and PBS see this label as misleading, as similar labels are seen on foreign government-controlled media outlets’ Twitter accounts such as Russia’s RT. According to NPR, less than one percent of their annual operating budget comes from federal agencies and departments. Similarly, PBS says just 15 percent of their revenue comes from the federal tax system.
“We don’t have state controlled media that operates domestically in the United States, and it is a very proud part of our democracy,” said University of Maryland Lecturer and senior media scholar Sara Oates. “We can’t pretend that wasn’t a politically motivated labeling, that’s just propaganda.”
These labels arrived on Twitter after business tycoon Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the platform in October of 2022. He purportedly purchased the platform to promote free and open speech on the social media site.
Oates believes Musk, “was interested and he is interested in Twitter as his own personal megaphone.”
In the recent past, Twitter has been a journalistically centered platform. Alexander Pyles, director of the Capital News Service Audience Engagement Bureau and University of Maryland Lecturer, shared that 40% of the United States uses Twitter. Journalists use the platform as a “listening device to better understand communities.”
“It’s a place where there are users, unlike yourself, that you can learn quite a lot from,” Pyles said. “And I think that’s just critically important to journalism.”
With Twitter having been at the center of journalism in the internet age, many wonder what the future of the profession would look like without it.
Pyles believes that Twitter’s death sentence would be a mass exodus of users. Oates agrees.
“Twitter relies on everyone using it, right? So it’s kind of not like the highway or hospitals. Which you might not like, particularly the way they are run, but you have to use them. No one has to be on Twitter,” she said.
She believes that if respectable figures and brands continue to leave the platform that it would become a “junkyard.” In the future, she sees a world in which journalists interact in a private sphere like Facebook Messenger. Now, some journalists are experimenting with platforms like Mastodon to connect with each other.
Pyles does not know what to make of the future of Twitter. However, he has high hopes for the future of social media as a whole.
“I hope that somehow social media becomes a more trustworthy place,” Pyles said. “I think the social media companies have decided they don’t want to play a role in that.”
Featured image: NPR and PBS are the first major news outlets to leave Twitter. Graphic by Abigail Olear.