> Twitter is headquartered in the United States

So you expect companies to have jingoistic political allegiance to the jurisdiction that they happen to have been founded in? That is actually quite scary.

> strongly believes that Russian social media propaganda is attempting to destabilize the United States government

The key word here is "destabilize". If the NYT were to write a story about the water pollution in Flint Michigan and also break a story that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, would that cause "destabilization"? I certainly hope it would! More than a few people should not win office again after such a fiasco.

The purpose of journalism is to be adversarial to powerful interests, and to share the truth (even if it's unflattering) with the public, so that corrective actions can be taken... corrective actions may involve changing the status quo.

As for "disinformation", nobody has pointed out what stories should be considered disinformation, and whether they were completely false, or if they were true but misleading.

Russia shutting down VOA is not terribly relevant here. The VOA is obviously propaganda if you listen for 10-15 minutes, while RT has focused on some important issues for the poorest Americans that do not get reliable coverage from other big media outlets.

I don't see many businesses having huge instinctive "jingoistic political allegiances", frankly, unless perhaps if it's a SOA or military driven or the like. However, most businesses in any nation tend to work with and cooperate with national governments on various probes, particularly where they are headquartered, unless there is a huge reason not to. Congress is heavily scrutinizing Facebook and Twitter over Russian influence at the moment; reports like this (https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf) heavily critical of RT and Sputnik's role in this election are being produced by our intelligence agencies. So in this regard, Twitter's reaction is not surprising.

We'll never know is how much Twitter management agreed to drop RT/Sputnik advertising based on what they felt was right (due to whatever reason), what was right or good for the business, or whether they did this largely due to pressure from the government. The main thing we know is that Twitter's corporate reaction here is obviously different than, say, Twitter's corporate reaction to their role in the Arab Spring.

Most of the time, in general, I think RT / Sputnik do report actual events, but with a very heavy pro-Kremlin slant (so not unlike VOA in this regard). However, they dip enough of their toes into the Infowars style conspiracy theory stuff (in part because relying on native disaffected groups is part of their strategy -- http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/57133... ) that I wouldn't trust an article only sourced there at all. If RT "broke" that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, for instance, I'd look elsewhere to confirm that story.

> If RT "broke" that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, for instance, I'd look elsewhere to confirm that story.

Of course, as would I. It is not my understanding that the allegations of disinformation have to do with fake stories RT has allegedly broken. If so the number of stories to read to gauge the accuracy of the claims would be much smaller :)