Twitter bans ads from RT and Sputnik over election allegations

Twitter has banned advertising from two Russian media companies, Russia Today and Sputnik, citing claims from the US intelligence community that they attempted to interfere in last year's presidential election on behalf of the Kremlin.

The messaging platform said it did not come to the decision “lightly”. It announced the move as it prepares to appear in front of Congress next week to answer questions about the information operations of Russian actors on the platform.

Twitter announced last month that RT had promoted 1,823 tweets that were “definitely or potentially” aimed at the US market, by spending $274,100 on ads in 2016 that promoted news stories and targeted them at followers of mainstream media accounts.

“Early this year, the US 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,” the US company said in a statement on its blog.

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Twitter added that RT and Sputnik were not being thrown off the platform altogether. They can continue to tweet, including to people who choose to follow them, but will not be allowed to buy advertisements to project their message further. RT has more than 2.6 million followers on one of its Twitter accounts and Sputnik has more than 200,000.

RT issued a punchy response to the ad ban. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief, claimed Twitter had encouraged the media outlet to buy adverts around the election. She wrote – on Twitter – that she hoped Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey “won’t forget to tell Congress how Twitter pitched RT to spend big $$s on US elex ad campaign”.

Screen shots

She posted screen shots from what she claimed to be a pitch deck related to the US election, promoting Twitter as a place to “deliver an unbiased point of view of the US elections with an edge utilising the powerful technology of Twitter to distribute the message in real-time”.

Sputnik said the decision was “regrettable”.

Twitter said it would donate the estimated $1.9 million it had earned from RT’s ad spending since 2011 to support research into the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections. The external research will include looking into the use of malicious automation and misinformation, it said.

RT and Sputnik have accounts on Facebook and YouTube, but it is not known if they have bought advertising on those platforms. On Facebook, RT has more than 4.5 million followers and Sputnik has more than 1.1 million. On YouTube, RT claims to be the most watched news network by number of video views and has 2.2 million subscribers, while Sputnik has more than 20,000 followers.

Twitter unveiled plans earlier this week to make advertising more transparent, as US politicians work on proposed legislation to make digital political ads subject to the same rules as ads on TV. Twitter said it would publish all ads running on the platform in one place, so anyone can see them, and ads endorsing candidates will be tagged with “promoted by a political account”.

The San Francisco-based company had been criticised by Senator Mark Warner, who has led the charge against tech groups over Russia, for being ill-prepared when it met in private with the Senate intelligence committee.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017