Musk reportedly threatens to delete the NPR Twitter account.

On May 2nd, a report by NPR revealed that Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, had threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account to another company. NPR had stopped posting content to its official Twitter feeds last month due to a Twitter designation that implied government involvement in its editorial content. Musk questioned NPR’s engagement with Twitter and suggested reassigning the @NPR handle to another organization or person. In response, NPR quoted Musk as saying, “Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant. Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR.” Despite this, both NPR and Twitter remained silent on the matter, declining to provide any comment to Reuters.

It is worth noting that Twitter’s policy dictates that users should log in to their account at least once every 30 days to avoid permanent removal due to prolonged inactivity. This policy has resulted in other notable media outlets, such as PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to halt their activity on Twitter following similar labeling. Although Twitter eventually dropped the labels, the affected outlets have yet to resume their activity on the platform as of the time of this writing.