Russia’s RT Editor-In-Chief Thanks Elon Musk For Scrapping ‘State-Affiliated Media’ Label On Twitter

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Twitter has dropped all labels that warn customers when a media outlet could also be funded by varied governments world wide, together with the whole lot from NPR to Russia’s RT. And the editor-in-chief of RT expressed her thanks for the transfer on Twitter, attracting criticism from Twitter customers who’re upset about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The choice to drop all labels occurred late Thursday and was reportedly an thought from Walter Isaacson, the writer of a number of books on well-known males, who’s at the moment engaged on a e-book about Twitter CEO Elon Musk. NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn reported on Friday that Musk explained, “This was Walter Isaacson’s suggestion.”

A number of western media organizations expressed frustration when their accounts, together with PBS, Canada’s CBC and NPR, have been labeled with “government-funded media” descriptors. NPR protested as a result of solely about 2% of its funding got here from the federal authorities. Most of NPR’s funding is from company sponsorships and charges charged to native radio stations.

However authorities funded media retailers in different international locations generally received a distinct label, marked as “state-affiliated media,” to indicate the retailers didn’t have any editorial independence. China’s Xinhua and Russia’s RT obtained these labels, together with reporters carefully affiliated with these retailers.

RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan had a label till Thursday evening, when all of the labels began to vanish.

“Twitter de-labeled me and all of our channels as ‘public funded media’. Now you possibly can even discover me within the search,” RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan tweeted on Friday, in response to an English-language translation.

Simonyan went on to thank Elon Musk by title, “from the center.”

Simonyan has been a chief propagandist for Vladimir Putin’s regime by brazenly celebrating censorship in the country, defending a media determine who recommended drowning Ukrainian children, even saying that Russia ought to use nuclear weapons within the warfare in Ukraine.

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