Does this not make Twitter AND RT look bad? They've just proven something they and Trump have been denying.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putins-raspu...
For people living in communist countries, there was an important mental exercise: if Russian media claim something, let's start by assuming, that most probably something exactly opposite happened!!!
I'm struggling to see the difference here, other than Jack/Twitter doesn't care that it has an agenda or is influenced by a government, but they disagree with the particular agenda...
Yes RT is worse, but it's also more overt, this divide will always be full of shades of gray not black/white. It's a very dangerous road to travel down, letting Twitter be the arbiter of news orgs, and if this is going to be limited to simply Russia and not hundreds of other news orgs then it's quite obvious it has it's own agenda as well.
I think you are reading far more into my post than I wrote.
It’s reasonable to assume this is indeed one of the objectives behind RT, undermining western news media. In 2008 the Kremlin had TV-Novosti (RT is a brand of TV-Novosti) on its list of core list of "core organizations of strategic importance of Russia" for example. Just look at the guests they have on there to perpetrate narratives against governments and cultures they see as adversary.
From Liz Wahl who resigned from RT on air, blaming it for propaganda:
“They get these extreme voices on that have this kind of hostile toward the West viewpoints towards the world, very extremist. These are the people that they have on. And when I was on the anchor desk, they would instruct you to egg on these guests and try to get them, you know, rallied up, to really fire off their anti-American talking points. Listen, I'm all about exposing government corruption. I'm all about being critical of the government. But this is different. This is promoting the foreign policy of somebody that has just invaded a country, has invaded the country and is then lying about it, is using the media as a tool to fulfill his foreign policy interests. And RT is part of Putin's propaganda network and it's very, very troubling in the wake of what is going on in Ukraine today.”
For my own reference, could you supply some links to support you assertion that the American press is highly influenced by American intelligence? My perception of the US press is that this type of manipulation is really not prevalent on a large coordinated scale.
Yet here is Russia's state owned propaganda station a admitting twitter pitched the idea of them targeting the the US elections with their adverts.
They proposed a partnership with an organisation they hoped would buy ads promoting political reporting. I don't see why this casts Twitter in a negative light.
That kind of sounds like traitorous behavior to me, but I'm also a bit judgmental.
If you believe this statement is true, then how do you know the post we’re commenting on is not propaganda?
Where are the cries of UK and Qatari collusion and interference?
And how is Putin responsible for Twitter pitching this to RT?
And how does this have anything to do with Trump?
You have to jump through some pretty impressive mental hoops to view this as sign of Trump-Russia collusion.
And yet there is silence.
^^ my point exactly.. does anyone honestly believe that russia is the only state actor that attempted to influence the elections, and further, the only one that broke the law to do so? or is it only those countries who agree with status quo policies are allowed to interfere to maintain the status quo?
This report from RT (which in my opinion doesn't say a lot except "Twitter advertised targeted marketing", a non-story in my mind) is simply RT's reaction to Twitter refusing advertisements from them. And Twitter's advertisement withdrawal appears to be their response to getting the "spotlight" in the election interference probe last month.
The US government does not seem very concerned with Al Jazeera despite being a Qatar mouthpiece in essence. If it was just RT and Sputnik alone, I speculate there wouldn't be too much concern. (The UK is a strong political ally so bringing up the BBC is a non-starter. :) )
The key here IMHO is that that Russia also used bot networks, "troll armies", and "fake news" to promote their candidate. They also engaged in hacking computers of a certain political party. I speculate that all of this combined, as far as US intelligence is concerned, stepped over the line.
What is pretty clear at this point that fairly decent sized portions of the United States government are not very happy about this -- new sanctions were applied largely over this issue, there are several high-level intelligence reports focused on the above election interference issue, etc.
As far as cries of Qatari collusion and interference goes, actually, that has happened. Qatar is undergoing a blockade by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt at the moment. A large part of that is due to Qatar's role in financing Al Jazeera, and much of the problem these nations have with that channel began with Al Jazeera's role in the Arab Spring. ( https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/217243... ).
So, where Al Jazeera / Qatar most directly influenced politics, there most definitely was an outcry and a government response.
Not sure what effect it will actually have in practice. Pushing propaganda on well-known propaganda sites is hardly the best way to go about it.
Instead of taking the "we're just a platform" position Twitter is only further digging themselves into this hole. They are further making themselves the arbitrators of what content is allowed on the site. So when anything happens in the future they can't say they don't have a role, as they happily demonstrated their willingness here.
So I expect to see plenty more of this going forward.
There is zero admission of guilt here... unless you're looking for very weak correlations that fit your worldview.
PS: This "leak" or whatever we want to call it looks pretty much as if someone with that agenda (might be just a fraction of RT, I consider them much more a freewheeling agent of chaos than a micromanaged propaganda machine) identified a situation were they could not lose and decided to stoke the fire.
This doesn't contradict that, rather it shows that Twitter was the one 'colluding'.
Twitter does nothing to promote biased reporting in this, merely that RT should use their platform for political reporting.
This is grasping at straws.
Him and how many other hundreds of millions of other users, using Twitter for its primary purpose.
If 'Twitter sold ads to Russia and <candidate> used Twitter to promote their own propaganda' is the baseline for collusion with Russia to influence the election then that would make every single presidential candidate guilty of collusion also.