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>RT has had some great coverage of under-publicized issues in the US... issues involving the poor, failing infrastructure, hypocrisy, etc. Yes it's not flattering to the US that these stories are written, but they are true and newsworthy and should absolutely not be suppressed.

RT hasn't been blocked from twitter, it is still allowed to do all those things.

Now that Twitter has an algorithmic feed, perhaps content that is from banned advertisers gets penalized in the algorithm. It's all very shady and disappointing.

Okay, but that's a pretty big assumption. You can't go on a large tirade against twitter censoring alternative journalism without something to back it up.

If you were worried about this feeding into twitter's algorithm why wasn't that your main point?

Twitter can control the algorithm indirectly through selective banning of sock puppet or spam accounts, since many exist that help create virality for many different agendas.

For years now Twitter has allowed a lot of shady accounts to be created simply because they help its growth and engagement numbers. If a Russian hacker writes a bot that retweets scintillating stories about an American politician, and this leads to more Twitter users scrolling their feed and viewing ads, Twitter wins.

This is why the sock puppet ecosystem has been allowed to exist in spite of the very easy detection of various spam rings (they are easily detectable through simple graph analysis).

The problem for Twitter is that it can't say "oops the engaged users numbers we've been talking about for the past few years are all massively inflated, we just deleted 100M sock puppet accounts and it turns out that our service is a lot less popular and a lot less engaging than we thought".

So I'm not worried about Twitter tuning the algorithm since it has much easier ways of nudging the politics of the average user's news feed in whatever direction it wants.

The concern is that Twitter bowed to political pressure from US politicians and penalized a news organization that should be investigated and shut down by an appropriate legal process if it's actually doing something more propaganda-like than other news orgs.

Last time I checked, most news orgs (including CNN, the NYT, etc.) were all doing massive clickbait campaigns through many different advertising channels. RT is no exception.

This is a dangerous form of scapegoating and censorship that happens to be legal because Twitter is a private firm. But it's very ugly and reveals a fear of or complicity with various elected officials in the US.

>censorship

There you go using that word again. I'd like to re-iterate that no longer accepting advertisements != censoring RT journalism.

NYT, CNN, etc. all use viral clickbait strategies. Using such strategies, one needs to "seed" the content on social media. Ads are an easy way to do this.

An increasing number of people get their news from social media, making the process of "seeding" very important to the publication process. Arguably a news org can't exist without this process working. They have to have someone on staff who can write the clickbait headline, and they have to have someone on staff who can place the ads on social media to seed the content.

By breaking RT's ability to do this, Twitter is exerting highly targeted editorial control over the content that hits its algorithmic feeds. Shameful stuff.

>We still don't know much about the Hillary Clinton or Podesta emails as none of the few possibly troubling things (mostly campaign finance violation stuff) has been investigated

You have no way of knowing the details about any investigations past or present. Investigations are usually done in secret. We do know that the FBI investigated but the details of that are not public, only that no criminal activity was found. Also Any US Attorney General can start Grand Jury proceedings (also secret) at any time.

OK, so your point is that RT's coverage was germane?

Russia has long played up domestic strife in the US to disprove the notion of American exceptionalism. Embarrassment over America's portrayal abroad was a key reason the Kennedy administration grudgingly supported aspects of the civil rights movement.

On the other hand, there are plenty of international news organisations shining a light on the parts of America that Americans don't want to see, and none of those news organisations are operating under the direction of a foreign power. RT is quite clearly seen by the Russian government as a useful propaganda tool, and not a news outlet that would ever challenge the current Russian government's malfeasance.

> RT is quite clearly seen by the Russian government as a useful propaganda tool, and not a news outlet that would ever challenge the current Russian government's malfeasance.

Well I don't think we're likely to see the NYT or Fox or CNN challenging the US Government in any significant way. They are actually all consistently doing the US's bidding by helping sell various war efforts to their fans/viewers.

> Russia has long played up domestic strife in the US to disprove the notion of American exceptionalism.

So an editorial stance that rejects American Exceptionalism is now suspect? In my view the litmus test for RT is if the content stops at rejecting American Exceptionalism, or whether it goes further and attempts to make Americans believe things that are actually not true.

Considering how much content in a typical issue of the NYT reinforces American Exceptionalism, it's quite refreshing to read something now and then that dispenses with that. The idea of American Exceptionalism is very harmful to the democratic process in America and to the world in general. I think it's among the most devastating and harmful ideas ever if measured by the suffering it has caused.

The problem is that our own papers offer American Exceptionalism in high doses every single day.

We've literally just come off 8 years of Fox challenging the U.S. administration at every turn.

The Pentagon Papers is a rather historical example, but stands. I'd be interested in what you'd consider a refutation of your claim.

The issue with RT isn't that it challenges American Exceptionalism. You can find that natively, largely in the left and alterative press, or critics such as Chomsky or Hedges or Naomi Klein, among many others. (They also, typically, do argue that the NYT and Post are establishment organs. It's possible to make that claim without descending to RT's depths. Quite easily.)

It's that it has no interest in either the truth or advancing a positive alternative in doing so. Your litmus test is bogus.

> It's that it has no interest in ... the truth

Of the major US news media outlets, which do you think care about truth? It is rare for any to publish corrections, and in fact a NYT public editor recently resigned over the paper's unwillingness to be honest about its mistakes.

> We've literally just come off 8 years of Fox challenging the U.S. administration at every turn.

The two-party back-and-forth is importantly not at all threatening to the status quo, because the two parties share power. The role of Fox and MSNBC are to keep the public focused on silly, partisan issues like the validity of Obama's birth certificate.

What endangers the status quo is that the public might actually realize that there are much more important things to worry about and much different things the government should be spending money on.

Hence, third party candidates are not invited to the debates, and issues for the public to become outraged about are offered as entertainment: Big storms, white girls being kidnapped, female teachers having sex with students, the personal lives of celebrities, and generally bad things about living in other countries.

> The Pentagon Papers is a rather historical example, but stands. I'd be interested in what you'd consider a refutation of your claim.

The press has had varying degrees of quality and independence since the days when the NYT was indistinguishable from the local gossip rag. The pentagon papers is one of the high points of American journalism, but we should not assume that American journalism is still the same.

When Edward Snowden wanted to leak information about massive dishonesty and conspiracy by the NSA in domestic surveillance, he did not go to the NY Times. That tells us all we need to know. As it was, he went to journalists who ended up breaking the story in The Guardian, but who were fairly quickly made to know that the Guardian would not support the continued adversarial stance with the US Government needed to follow through with the analysis and selective publication of the bulk of the documents.

The journalists were reluctant to return to the US after reporters had been threatened and jailed.

Among the most notable examples is the way that the NYT distanced itself from Julian Assange after the allegations of rape from Sweden were publicized. It turns out that in Sweden if someone has consensual sex and then days later decides that he or she revokes consent, that falls under the definition of rape. Oddly in all of the coverage of Assange amid these allegations, the NYT did not think it relevant to mention this very important difference in the legal meaning of the word rape in Sweden vs the US.

I have no idea whether Assange acted improperly with those women, but we did not get a clear and accurate accounting of the nature of the alleged act from the NYT, as leaving that information out was helpful in the character assassination campaign the paper had undertaken against him, after determining that the Iraq War Logs, diplomatic cables, and Afghanistan War Logs contained virtually no relevant information and that the officials involved did not deserve any accountability for the revelations that the NYT's thorough coverage might have led to.

> It is rare for any to publish corrections

It happens all the goddamn time, but there are also reasonably stringent editorial controls that prevent blatant mistruths from getting through. RT never corrects the record after it has been shown to publish government-manufactured stories.

> When Edward Snowden wanted to leak information about massive dishonesty and conspiracy by the NSA in domestic surveillance, he did not go to the NY Times. That tells us all we need to know.

No it doesn't - it just describes the very particular evidence (the possession of which constituted a federal crime) and the knowledge that it was safer in the hands of journalists overseas.

> Oddly in all of the coverage of Assange amid these allegations, the NYT did not think it relevant to mention this very important difference in the legal meaning of the word rape in Sweden vs the US.

> we did not get a clear and accurate accounting of the nature of the alleged act from the NYT

That's bollocks. If you bother to look, they're there: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/world/europe/29iht-letter2... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/world/europe/19assange.htm...

You left out the dozens of other articles that omitted the details.

Nothing you mentioned is being affected by this change. They are no longer to purchase advertisements, but you can still follow RT and get news updates from them.

Your post is just as much a political statement as Twitters, which is hilariously ironic.

What is concerning is that Twitter controls a massive platform and has revealed itself to be heavily biased and intent upon ideological control of the content that exists on its platform.

My statement is simply my opinion, I am not controlling anyone else's access to a platform or to information by holding that opinion. I encourage you to read some RT stories.

You will find that the reporting is generally solid but simply lacks the "Rah Rah USA USA" attitude that has become (embarrassingly) commonplace in our culture. I cringe when I see politicians wearing red or blue ties and American flag pins, as if doing that signals their devout patriotism.

It's a similarly shallow world view that leads people to overlook RT's reporting and focus on its state sponsored origin before evaluating its contribution to American political discourse.

I'd personally prefer if there were more anger about certain kinds of issues in the US -- such as the Flint Water crisis, lead in the water in many cities, foolish and corrupt infrastructure projects, etc.

> What is concerning is that Twitter controls a massive platform and has revealed itself to be heavily biased and intent upon ideological control of the content that exists on its platform.

Your entire post is making the assumption that Twitter did this because they just believed the US/Russia election meddling stories or something.

Maybe there was clear and documented malice involved? Who knows! Certainly not you. But, reading this and immediately thinking "Twitter has now admitted they are on the side of the Democrats and believes all these Russia stories" is foolish and fails to consider that maybe something weird _might_ be going on, and maybe Twitter actually made a good decision here.

Don't worry about me though, I read plenty of international news - but I'm not going to bother with state sponsored organizations like RT.

> malice involved

Then why not mention that in the announcement? The problem is that Twitter is not pointing to any specific content that it is willing to admit was harmful. Doing that would give us too clear a glimpse into the ideological view Twitter holds.

I rarely read RT myself, but like seeing stories that shine light upon problems with American institutions and infrastructure, as well as problems and hypocrisy around foreign policy and humanitarian issues.

We have concentration camps in Gitmo, a prison system where inmates are routinely victimized by rape, and yet there is this idea that any news org that doesn't aggressively cheerlead "USA USA" is harming our democracy. I'd like our democracy to develop the teeth necessary to fix/eliminate the prisons and camps, and evict some of the most corrupt officials -- Paul Ryan has been a public servant his whole life and mysteriously has a net worth of over $8M. The Clintons are worth over $250M after a few decades in public service. What is going on here, we have to be willing to see the ugliness of our system and the corruption that is all around us.

If RT helps us see that and take corrective action, all the better. Ironically I think those opposed to the sort of discord RT might cause are implicitly idealizing a compliant public like one might find in a well-controlled fascist state.

> it was offering a view of the US that was not really available from American news outlets

of course it wasn't. their view is literally Kremlin narrated propaganda. how american news outlets are supposed to know that stuff?

Twitter is an American company, and is publicly traded as such. They have a responsibility to appease shareholders. This isn't really about politics at all, or patriotism, it's about money.

Not all of their shareholders are American, in fact much of the equity is largely concentrated amongst a few relatively well known names

https://www.recode.net/2016/8/11/12417064/twitter-stock-owne...

They could be more transparent about ads by informing people who is sponsoring them. But that might upset their other advertisers.