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.
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?
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.
