Against Twitter

I left Twitter a year ago, when the morally vacuous right-wing billionaire Elon Musk announced he was buying the company. A few months ago, I rejoined, a decision I now regret. There was never any question that Musk's vicious world-view would drag the service deeper in the mire — and it was a politically poisonous apparatus from the start. What caused me to quit again was Twitter's treatment of NPR. A vaunted news organization that receives about one percent of its funding from the government was labeled "state-affiliated media" on Twitter, alongside the likes of Russia Today. The designation was later changed to "government-funded," which is still wrong. In response, John Lansing, NPR's president, has announced that the institution will no longer be posting on Twitter. Lansing writes: "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 ... Actions by Twitter or other social media companies to tarnish the independence of any public media institution are exceptionally harmful and set a dangerous precedent."