[imron]

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.

[soundwave106]

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.

[cat199]

> 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?

[akavel]

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?

[imron]

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.