PBS Joins NPR in Ditching Twitter

Twitter lost another major media outlet last night, as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) abandoned the platform after being labeled “government-funded media.”

PBS joins fellow nonprofit media organization NPR in ditching Twitter over the new tag.

“PBS stopped tweeting from our account [on April 8] when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” a company spokesperson told Bloomberg(Opens in a new window). “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

Twitter defines(Opens in a new window) government-funded media as “outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”

According to the PBS Foundation(Opens in a new window), federal funding provides about 15% of its revenue; the rest comes from private support and public donations. NPR, meanwhile, receives less than 1% of its money from government grants, though it does receive funds from member stations, which can also receive government funding.

The “government-funded media” label was originally created to identify tweets from state-controlled news agencies like China’s People’s Daily and Russia’s RT.com, which are known for circulating government propaganda. New Twitter owner Elon Musk, however, recently expanded the label to NPR(Opens in a new window) and PBS(Opens in a new window), despite the firms operating as independent news organizations.

“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.

Both Twitter accounts remain live, but have not been updated since last week—save for NPR’s flurry of Wednesday posts pointing its 8.8 million followers to National Public Radio’s mobile app, topical newsletters, and other social media platforms.

Twitter had also labeled the BBC as “government-funded media.” But after Musk conducted a surprise Tuesday interview with the BBC—and objections from the British broadcaster—Twitter this week changed the main BBC account to say “publicly funded.”

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