To me it makes perfect sense that when a foreign state actor is determined to be hostile to your country by your intelligence community, that you are going to stop accepting money from them.
Also seems (if RT is telling the truth) that the paid RT election propaganda on twitter was actually twitter's idea that they pitched to RT, so perhaps twitter got greedy and is complicit (as opposed to just having ran ads indiscriminately) and now they're trying to wash their hands to avoid a PR disaster.
Link: https://twitter.com/M_Simonyan/status/923519609269116928
I think it's not just about being state-funded, but "powerful interests" funded. Large corporations want to control public opinions just as much. US government doesn't sponsor CNN directly, but it itself as a business as well as its advertisers are vested in having one political outcome vs another. They are far from neutral.
As to the topic at hand, it all started with a PR campaign promoted by Clinton and the media organizations which backed her candidacy (to the point of handing her debate questions beforehand or smearing or silencing her opponents) that Russians significantly altered the results of the election, up to and including flipping the result completely.
We've heard for months Russians, Russians, Russians, "17 Intelligence agencies", piss dossier blackmail, secret meetings or coded gestures being signaled at some dinners and so on. It is a story many want to believe, because it explains their view of the world -- "my compatriots could not have possibly have voted how they did", or "my candidate was so good and experienced there is no way people could have voted for any other candidate". So there is a desire to believe in these conspiracy theories, simply because they provide an explanation for what happened.
As you said, Russia is interfering with elections, so are Americans, Chinese, anybody with money is going to trying to influence election results in US. They'd be stupid not to.
And I agree in general with the idea of identifying and stopping the influence as much as possible, so good on Twitter here. What is suspicious is this continuous obsession with Russia. I think it is a distraction and a waste of time. I think a better obsession would be an obsession with US. Say looking at what's happening here and why did so many people voted how they did. It has nothing to do with KGB. But then again I've accused of being a "Russian shill" since I don't seem to like Clinton and don't tow the party line here. So you know, take these words with a grain of salt (or maybe a shot of vodka).
Consider the international broadcasters like Voice of America, the BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle. These organisations are state-funded, broadcast to dozens of foreign countries via shortwave or satellite and often have explicit foreign policy goals. A government beaming news reports into a foreign (and often hostile) country is at the very least suspicious.
We know as a fact that the US has engaged in major international astroturfing campaigns, using large clusters of VPN nodes and thousands of bogus personae to influence public debate in foreign countries. There's a not-unreasonable argument that this capability is mainly being used to combat "extremism", but there's a huge amount of disagreement about what exactly constitutes "extremism".
Perhaps it's time for an international convention on psychological warfare? At the very least, it would be useful to have some kind of high-level debate on where we draw the line between providing an alternative viewpoint and engaging in hostile propaganda activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice