[VVayneTracker]

Agreed. I wonder how much of that money is from strawman purchases that can't be traced directly to russia yet. When the dust finally settles on all this we'll see that twitter received millions from russian surrogates.

[SyneRyder]

There's already a news report from RT today claiming that Twitter actively courted them (RT) for advertising during the elections, and have published a Keynote slide deck from a presentation they claim Twitter presented to them:

https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-r...

They claim that in return for $1.5m upfront spend during the elections, Twitter would promote Russia Today's tweets and provide them with an inhouse team to curate content and provide strategy. For $500K extra, Twitter would promote RT's moments to 60 Million users. There was an offer for a $3.3m total ad spend.

But it should be pointed out that would not feed into this quarter's revenues, as it was for late 2016. And the story all depends on whether you believe the slide deck from RT is genuine or not.

(There's a separate HN discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566663 )