"Spiraling" Musk threatens to transfer NPR’s account to another company

US National Public Radio (NPR) has not been active on Twitter since mid-April, when it was falsely labeled as “state-affiliated media.” Now, the platform’s boss Elon Musk threatens to reassign the network’s main account under the @NPR handle.

NPR stopped posting content to its 52 official Twitter feeds last month in protest against a Twitter designation that implied government involvement in its editorial content.

The organization said at the beginning of April that it operated independently of the US government and announced that it was leaving Twitter.

The network, followed by other public media organizations such as PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, immediately stopped tweeting and hasn’t done so since – despite Twitter later dropping the “state-affiliated media” label. Now, NPR says Musk has contacted them.

“In a series of emails sent to this reporter, Musk said he would transfer the network's main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person,” NPR wrote.

Musk, in an email to an NPR reporter, asked about its engagement with Twitter, the public broadcaster said. "So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?" NPR quoted Musk as saying.

"Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant," he said in another email. "Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR."

Technically, Musk is doing nothing wrong. According to Twitter's own policy, users should log in to their account at least once every 30 days to avoid permanent removal due to prolonged inactivity.

However, handing over established accounts to third parties quite obviously poses a serious risk of impersonation and can endanger a company’s reputation. According to some critics, the problem is Musk’s alleged belief that Twitter is his personal toy.

“Musk's threat to take NPR is the writing on the wall. He sees every account as his personal plaything. Including yours. Musk is spiraling because things aren't going his way,” John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, tweeted.

“Given the abysmal self-own of this Twitter Blue fiasco, the fails will continue. So, he will escalate.”

Even though, at its inception in 1970, it was entirely paid for by the government, NPR says it now gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources, mostly in the form of grants from the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Under the leadership of Musk, Twitter’s role as a traffic referral source to publishers’ sites is largely declining. Twitter referral traffic to a dozen major publishers’ websites declined, on average, by 12% in December 2022 compared to the previous month, according to an analysis by Similarweb, a data analytics company that monitors web traffic.