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.
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.
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.