Autocrats Will Benefit Most from Twitter’s New Approach to State-Affiliated Media

E. Rosalie Li is a researcher and recent interdisciplinary graduate from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. On April 4, Elon Musk’s Twitter added a new label to the account for National Public Radio (NPR). The decades-old independent broadcaster is now classified as “state-affiliated.”  The move came even though Twitter’s policy said that funding from a government source alone does not warrant the label of “state-affiliated media,” provided the outlet has editorial independence, as in the case of the BBC in the UK. Contrast that with outlets such as Russia’s RT and Sputnik, where even employees have highlighted the lack of editorial freedom in these Kremlin-backed organizations, bolstering the case for their classification as “state-affiliated.”  Twitter’s (or perhaps more accurately, Musk’s) seemingly arbitrary decision risks undermining the distinction between ethical, state-financed journalism and propaganda arms controlled by autocratic regimes. A gift to dictatorial leaders who hide behind claims of persecution, these corrosive changes occur in an increasingly hostile online environment, where censorship and suppression of free speech are major concerns. And, it raises serious questions about whether Musk is a responsible steward of such an important platform. NPR and RT: Apples and Oranges  As of April 5, 2023, Twitter’s policy on “Government and state-affiliated” outlets still seemed to exclude an outlet such as NPR, which receives only a small portion of its budget from government sources: “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the…Autocrats Will Benefit Most from Twitter’s New Approach to State-Affiliated Media