The Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, Elon Musk, “threatened” to reassign National Public Radio’s Twitter account to another company on Tuesday.
Musk suggested reassigning the network’s primary account, which goes by the handle @NPR, to another organisation or person.
Last month, NPR stopped posting to its 52 official Twitter handles in protest of a Twitter designation that implied government involvement in its editorial content.
Musk enquired about the public broadcaster’s relationship with Twitter in an email to an NPR reporter, according to the public broadcaster.
“So, is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?” According to NPR, Musk stated.
“Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant,” he explained in another email. “Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR.”
According to Twitter’s policy, users must log in at least once every 30 days to avoid permanent removal due to inactivity.
PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation followed NPR’s lead and stopped tweeting after similar labelling.
Twitter later removed the labels, but the outlets targeted have not resumed activity, according to their profiles on Tuesday.