After 15 years, I mean the social media, not a job or something. I never worked for them. Although looking back I should have joined them back in 2008, or at least trying to apply for a job there, and get some stocks.
Why I am leaving:
In two words: Elon Musk. Elon created a lot of controversies during his about one year long ownership saga, from his public proposal to buy the company, after secretly building up a stake, to fire lots of people (which he may have a valid point, note a few big tech companies followed too, such Meta), to not paying bills for the Twitter SF office.
But the latest one: labelling NPR as “Government-funded Media” is the last straw for me. I googled “how much government fund npr is receiving”, and here is the answer: “NPR gets roughly 1-2% of its funding from the federal government, while the majority of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships and fees charged to local radio stations, according to the New York Times.” (source: NYTimes via Forbes). This is a cheap shot from Elon in my opinion.
Note NPR is one of my favorite news source, and I remember the days (more than 20 years ago), I listened to “Morning edition” from KWMU (now STL Public radio) on my morning commute. In addition to getting news, I improved my English listening comprehension greatly from listening to them. Other programs I listened frequently over the years: The Diane Rehm Show; MarketPlace; All Things Considered etc. In recent years, Some nights when I could not fall into sleep, I also listened to the BBC World Service via STL Public radio: it has a variety of topics. In the US, NPR may be considered a bit liberal or progressive (as opposed to the Fox News), but it’s mostly politically neural (similar to PBS). A fun fact, while a lot of western media are blocked in China, NPR is not (at least not now as of April 2023).
On the social media front, I will continue to be on FB (Instagram), LinkedIn, and YouTube. On blogging side, I have this stlplace.com blog website as well as medium, and substack. Btw, I posted some of the blog post here to the medium and substack.
Just notied that I have a post on Twitter about 6 months ago.
PS: as of 04-22-2023, it appears Twitter removed the “government-funded” label for NPR on Twitter. But it seems a bit late, at least for now, to get NPR back on Twitter, per this thread. Meanwhile, I am thinking back to Twitter for my own benefit. Consume or tweet in moderation.
PS 2: 06-05-2023, I bought the Twitter Blue today.