Good and bad are obsolete, there is only confusion. RT don't care about being trusted, they don't care about credibility, they only want to undermine the credibility of everyone else. If nobody is credible, if no information can be trusted, then there is no truth and no lies, only gut feeling.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putins-raspu...

Let's not get carried away

“they only want to undermine the credibility of everyone else”

It’s reasonable to assume this is indeed one of the objectives behind RT, undermining western news media. In 2008 the Kremlin had TV-Novosti (RT is a brand of TV-Novosti) on its list of core list of "core organizations of strategic importance of Russia" for example. Just look at the guests they have on there to perpetrate narratives against governments and cultures they see as adversary.

From Liz Wahl who resigned from RT on air, blaming it for propaganda:

“They get these extreme voices on that have this kind of hostile toward the West viewpoints towards the world, very extremist. These are the people that they have on. And when I was on the anchor desk, they would instruct you to egg on these guests and try to get them, you know, rallied up, to really fire off their anti-American talking points. Listen, I'm all about exposing government corruption. I'm all about being critical of the government. But this is different. This is promoting the foreign policy of somebody that has just invaded a country, has invaded the country and is then lying about it, is using the media as a tool to fulfill his foreign policy interests. And RT is part of Putin's propaganda network and it's very, very troubling in the wake of what is going on in Ukraine today.”

I mean clearly they broadcast a lot of anti-American stuff and their coverage of any story with Russia is suspect at best. But they have lots of real reporting and they're not just making stuff up. And it's useful to have a counterbalance to American papers, which are highly influenced by American intelligence services.

I agree counter balance is indeed healthy and I think generally, in the west, we are served a wealth of different viewpoints on any given issue, so much so that we can take it for granted. My point above was that RT, in the Kremlins own words, plays a core role in their wider global strategy and it absolutely plays a part in undermining the west.

For my own reference, could you supply some links to support you assertion that the American press is highly influenced by American intelligence? My perception of the US press is that this type of manipulation is really not prevalent on a large coordinated scale.

The topic is a hobby horse of Mark Ames, whose work I really admire. It's not necessarily on a "large, coordinated scale," but it's a mistake to assume it has to be to be influential.

Thanks for replying. I was however hoping for something more substantive though.

If I assume that RT is a propaganda tube (which I do), there's nothing to be carried away by here.

For people living in communist countries, there was an important mental exercise: if Russian media claim something, let's start by assuming, that most probably something exactly opposite happened!!!

RT obviously has an angle but it isn't Pravda.

WaPo/NYTimes has a very obvious agenda as well and thinks nothing of citing anonymous government sources in puffy articles.

I'm struggling to see the difference here, other than Jack/Twitter doesn't care that it has an agenda or is influenced by a government, but they disagree with the particular agenda...

Yes RT is worse, but it's also more overt, this divide will always be full of shades of gray not black/white. It's a very dangerous road to travel down, letting Twitter be the arbiter of news orgs, and if this is going to be limited to simply Russia and not hundreds of other news orgs then it's quite obvious it has it's own agenda as well.

Yes, that's kind of how I feel too.

nonono, you have it all wrong, my aganda is 'objective truth from an unbiased source' but your agenda is propaganda

All sources have an agenda beyond objective truth. Influence is a lot more subtle than just the obvious maneuver of publishing outright falsehoods. Through emphasis and omission you can easily mislead people without ever saying anything untrue. Assuming the reporter hasn't been lied to by his sources in the first place.

+1

Pravda was a complete failure in terms of influencing an international audience. RT is not repeating mistakes.

What is someone supposed to say to this, really? Yes, RT has much more credibility in the US and Europe than Pravda, but that is probably because, while hewing to an alternate viewpoint, they're doing actual reporting, and not just operating as a mindless propaganda outlet.

Are you saying that being a mindless propaganda outlet was not the reason Pravda never succeeded in influencing anybody in the west? The entire point of learning from that is that you have to build credibility.

I think you are reading far more into my post than I wrote.

No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that to be taken seriously they have to be serious, and they are serious enough that it doesn't make sense to talk about them like they're InfoWars.

Then take it from the multiple journalists who have quit and then apologized for enabling Putin’s propaganda. When the people who work their can’t stomach their employer that should tell you something.

Wow, that was a fascinating read. Thanks for posting.

I don't get it, please explain what do you mean.

All the Trump supporters etc have been screaming for months that there is nothing to see here. Russia has been claiming there was nothing to see.

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.

They are talking about promoting their own coverage of the election. They're a news media organization, that's what they all do... this has nothing specifically to do with them admitting to 'influencing the election' any differently than any other news organization.

There is zero admission of guilt here... unless you're looking for very weak correlations that fit your worldview.

Even if they were only promoting their coverage (I don't necessarily disagree with that), they can still push an agenda of destabilization by being cheeky about it. Gravely denying something you did not do is an effective way to play those who don't trust you in the first place.

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.

The presentation specifically promotes unbiased political reporting. In addition, many media organisations promote themselves as the go-to place for political reporting.

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.

It shows a Twitter desperate for profitability willing to work with known hostile foreign propagandists to target the US elections.

That kind of sounds like traitorous behavior to me, but I'm also a bit judgmental.

It sounds like Twitter is unbiased about who to work with to me.

> known hostile foreign propagandists

If you believe this statement is true, then how do you know the post we’re commenting on is not propaganda?

How many similar pitches did Twitter make to the BBC, Al Jazeera, and a bunch of other foreign media organisations?

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.

The extent of Trump's relationship with Putin is unknown at this time, but Russian election interference was largely about promoting one favored candidate (Trump) over another (Clinton).

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.

> Where are the cries of UK and Qatari collusion and interference?

^^ 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?

Eh, it's absolutely not yet Twitter doing something. It's only RT saying that Twitter was doing something. Please, if I say you did something, does this already mean you really did it? Wow, or maybe I wanted to damage your reputation by saying a lie?

If that was happening I'd expect Twitter to be issuing denials and saying that this was disinformation from RT.

And yet there is silence.

I mean they're a cable news station. What's nefarious about them advertising?

Twitter wants to appear to be responding to the election 'scandal'. Stopping thousands of people from using normal looking accounts to push propaganda is hard, if not impossible, so they went after the one organization that is overtly pushing Russian propaganda.

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.

Trump has been denying his campaign colluded with Russia.

This doesn't contradict that, rather it shows that Twitter was the one 'colluding'.

No, it shows Twitter partnering with a media organisation. I'm willing to bet Twitter offered similar deals to many other media outlets, both US and abroad.

Twitter does nothing to promote biased reporting in this, merely that RT should use their platform for political reporting.

I agree hence the reason I put 'colluding' in quotes.

This is grasping at straws.

Multiple parties can collude with Russia. The fact that Twitter was and Trump extensively uses Twitter for his own propaganda might underline that fact.

> Trump extensively uses Twitter for his own propaganda might underline that fact.

Him and how many other hundreds of millions of other users, using Twitter for its primary purpose.

If 'Twitter sold ads to Russia and <candidate> used Twitter to promote their own propaganda' is the baseline for collusion with Russia to influence the election then that would make every single presidential candidate guilty of collusion also.

Only one candidate colluded with Russia though.