Twitter’s San Francisco HQ Photo: MatthewKeys/Wikimedia Commons
Social media platform Twitter has decided to off-board advertising from all accounts owned by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, effective immediately, citing their attempts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Twitter will donate $1.9 million it earned from RT global advertising to support external research into the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections, including use of malicious automation and misinformation, with an initial focus on elections and automation.
“We will have more details to share on this disbursement soon,” Twitter said in a public policy statement Thursday.
The policy decision, it said, was “based on the retrospective work we’ve been doing around the 2016 U.S. election and the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election on behalf of the Russian government.”
“We did not come to this decision lightly, and are taking this step now as part of our ongoing commitment to help protect the integrity of the user experience on Twitter,” an announcement said.
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/New-Transparency-For-Ads-on-Twitter.html
The social media giant notes that the U.S. intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as “implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter.”
“This decision is restricted to these two entities based our internal investigation of their behavior as well as their inclusion in the January 2017 DNI report. This decision does not apply to any other advertisers. RT and Sputnik may remain organic users on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.”
This week, Twitter also announced to enhance its transparency on advertising.
