After RT published excerpts from Twitter's "limited offer" to spend millions on US election marketing, the company abruptly banned all advertising from the news network. This makes full disclosure and transparency imperative, so here goes.
On Thursday, the micro-blogging platform announced a policy decision to ban ads from RT and Sputnik, citing alleged meddling in the 2016 US election.
It followed Twitter's report implying that RT was trying to influence US public opinion, crucially without providing context that virtually all news media organizations spend money on advertising their news coverage.
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RT was thereby forced to reveal some details of the 2016 negotiations during which Twitter representatives made an exclusive multi-million dollar advertising proposal to spend big during the US presidential election, which was turned down.Having since been banned, and in order to set the record straight, we are publishing Twitter's presentation and details of the offer in full.
Lenin said it: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday October 30 2017, @12:49PM (4 children)
This is to show the russians aren't that stupid. If they had accepted the offer, Twitter would have had them now with "revenge porn" material. As it is now. it's more like "he said, she said".
In any case, if russians want to try screwing public opinion (election time or not), they are quite capable of doing in spite of the ban - just use blogging proxies, buy followers to retweet [google.com] and create hype [coincrack.com]. No need for an RT brand, many tabloids will pick "fake news" on the fly if they think it makes for good headlines and sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Monday October 30 2017, @01:53PM (3 children)
All this concern about the evil russians influencing the campaign. What about Twitter and the people that work there? They are quite heavy handed in forming "consensus" and selecting What's Hot on their system, then peddling that as some crowd-sourced opinion direct from the masses.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @02:32PM
What about it? its terrible. it ministry of truth - and it ties right into the article from yesterday about how and why sites like this, too small to get paid trolls, are sites that some would like to see shut down entirely. can't have small enterprises compete with the state-sponsored machinations so they misrepresent to cause a chilling effect while accusing others of what they do themselves! its a bummer how much air-time these people and their liars get. stupid social shaping. stupid starry eyed 20yos.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)
Yup, it is bad, but the constitution doesn't ban Americans from meddling in the election, only foreign influence.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 30 2017, @04:52PM
Some are just better at it than others [theonion.com]