"Transferring Twitter Account Elsewhere?"... Musk Sparks Threat Controversy

US NPR Exposes "Threat to Take Over Our Account"
"Typical Method Elon Musk Uses to Run Twitter"

Recently, the U.S. public radio broadcaster NPR revealed that "Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, threatened to hand over our company's Twitter account to another company."

On the 3rd (local time), according to NPR, Musk recently sent an email to an NPR journalist asking, "Will NPR repost on Twitter, or should we reassign NPR's Twitter account '@NPR' to another company?"

In another email, Musk pointed out, "Our policy is definitely to recycle dormant accounts," adding, "There is no special treatment for NPR."

Elon Musk. [Photo by Reuters Yonhap News]

Earlier, Twitter labeled the NPR account last month as "state-affiliated media," but after NPR protested, the label was changed to "government-funded media." NPR introduces itself as an "independent nonprofit media organization," and when Twitter applied such labels, NPR protested by completely suspending its use of Twitter. Another U.S. public broadcaster, PBS, also stopped using Twitter in protest after being classified as "state-affiliated media" by Twitter.

Amid the controversy, Twitter removed the label, but NPR has not posted any new content since its last post last month.

However, this does not meet Twitter's existing "dormant account conversion" criteria. According to Twitter's terms of service, account inactivity is based on login status rather than tweet posting, and logging in at least once every 30 days prevents permanent deletion, NPR argued.

NPR stated, "We asked Musk if he planned to change the account deactivation policy, but he did not respond," and "We also asked why he questioned NPR's suspension of use, but he did not answer that either."

They continued, "He threatened to hand over the NPR account, which has nearly 9 million followers, to another company, which is a typical way Musk operates this social networking service," adding, "As always, it is unclear whether Musk will turn his threats into actual actions."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.