NPR quits Twitter – but app doesn’t work as referral source anyway

America’s National Public Radio (NPR) says it will no longer post content on its Twitter feeds after the platform branded it “government-funded media”, and several other public news organizations followed suit. But Twitter was never that important to media outlets, research shows.

NPR will no longer post content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, in protest against a label by the social media platform that implies government involvement in the US organization's editorial content.

On Wednesday, NPR said Twitter refused its repeated requests to remove the inaccurate label of "state-affiliated media," now changed to "government-funded media," which did not accurately capture its public media governance structure.

The label is not correct, NPR points out, because it operates independently of the US government – the outlet gets less than 1% of its $300 million annual budget, on average, from federal sources, mostly in the form of grants from the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

"If we continued tweeting, every post would carry that misleading label," NPR said, and its CEO John Lansing said the network was protecting its credibility and ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.”

Initially, Twitter’s boss Elon Musk didn’t react to NPR’s decision but later sent out a series of tweets criticizing the network and called for it to be defunded. He also pointed out NPR’s website allegedly used to say that federal funding was “essential” to public radio.

In a BBC interview this week, Musk mused he might further change the label to “publicly funded.” But it seems that the bigwigs at NPR have had enough, and the outlet is not planning to return anytime soon – unless, apparently, change comes to Twitter.

“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," Lansing said. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."

British broadcaster BBC has also objected to being called “government funded” this week. It said that the corporation was independent by British law and that most of its budget is raised by the annual license fee paid by individual households.

While another US public broadcaster PBS also suspended tweets, NPR said it would remain on other social media platforms, and was reviewing whether it should expand to include emerging third-party platforms.

That might be a smart choice because research has for quite a while now shown Twitter never actually drove much traffic to news publishers, be they public or commercial.

Back in 2016, social analytics firm Parse.ly, which was acquired by Automattic in 2021, found that “Twitter generates 1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations.” In other words, people might be getting their news on the platform but they don’t necessarily click past the headlines.

What’s more, 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.