After taking on final 12 months, Twitter’s new proprietor has invented insurance policies on the fly, pushed questionable design modifications and customarily bent the platform to swimsuit his whims.

Within the newest installment of Elon Musk’s mercurial management saga, Twitter now classifies American information nonprofit NPR the identical means that it handles RT, the infamous Russian state-backed mouthpiece that pushes the Kremlin’s speaking factors to the broader world.

NPR’s Twitter account on the once-essential breaking information platform now comes with a tag denoting it as “US state-affiliated media.” However NPR doesn’t meet Twitter’s own definition for a state-affiliated account:

“State-affiliated media is outlined as retailers the place the state workout routines management over editorial content material by monetary sources, direct or oblique political pressures, and/or management over manufacturing and distribution…

State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, just like the BBC within the UK for instance, aren’t outlined as state-affiliated media for the needs of this coverage.”

NPR, which operates with editorial independence, isn’t managed by the U.S. authorities. And the information group solely acquired about one percent of its budget from federal funding in 2020.

The choice, which seems to have come out of the blue, might have as a lot to do with Elon Musk’s failure to grasp the media because it does his tendency to settle scores by altering Twitter’s guidelines and capabilities.

Based mostly on Musk’s prior assaults on the press, it’s doable that NPR has some unflattering investigative coverage of the tech mogul lined up. Nevertheless it’s simply as probably that Musk is simply flexing his affect to appease his followers and the upstart rightwing media retailers that he has repeatedly aligned himself with.

Simply previous to waging conflict with NPR, Musk took goal at The New York Occasions. Twitter’s customers waited with bated breath over the weekend in anticipation, ready for the directive that each one “legacy” test marks be stripped from beforehand verified accounts to come back to move. However legacy blue checks survived the weekend with one notable exception: The New York Occasions. Musk apparently revoked the NYT’s blue check himself after studying that the paper didn’t have plans to pay for his ill-conceived new pay-for-play verification service.

Musk’s disdain for traditional news media was a serious animating think about his choice to purchase Twitter to start with. And as Twitter decays into an disagreeable slurry of stale jokes, amplified hate and paid prominence, Musk will probably proceed to govern the social community to his personal ends, proper up till the wheels fall off or all of us cease paying consideration.