Twitter announced on Thursday that it would ban RT and Sputnik, the two Kremlin-backed international news outlets, from advertising on its platform, intensifying the battle over Russian propaganda on social media and prompting an immediate threat of retaliation from the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The decision marks one of the most aggressive moves by an American social media company against the outlets, which United States intelligence officials have linked to a wide-ranging Kremlin effort, both covert and overt, to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. Twitter’s ban comes as United States authorities are pressuring RT, formerly known as Russia Today, to register as a foreign agent under a World War II-era law intended to curtail Nazi propaganda.
“We did not come to this decision lightly, and are taking this step now as part of our ongoing commitment to help protect the integrity of the user experience on Twitter,” the company said in a blog post announcing the ban. The ban will not apply to any other advertisers, Twitter said, and RT and Sputnik will be allowed to retain their own Twitter accounts and followers.
RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, called Twitter’s decision “highly regrettable” and cast it as part of a punitive campaign by the United States government against her own country. Earlier on Thursday, Ms. Simonyan taunted Twitter on its own platform, tweeting that the company had pitched RT on a large advertising campaign for the 2016 election that RT had declined.
The Russian government, which in recent days has warned that it will respond in kind to American pressure on RT, responded even more forcefully. In a statement posted on Facebook, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, called Twitter’s decision “yet another aggressive step” and blamed the influence of American intelligence officials. “Naturally, a response will follow,” Ms. Zakharova said.
Twitter, along with Facebook and Google, is now at the center of congressional investigations into the Russian intervention in the 2016 election. Kremlin-linked operatives deployed paid human “trolls” and hordes of fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook to push news and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and criticism of the United States government. But RT and Sputnik, both of them funded by the Kremlin, worked openly, using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to amplify content critical of Mrs. Clinton, sometimes paying for advertisement to boost their stories more aggressively.
Now the Silicon Valley companies — long used to practically unchallenged clout in Washington — face rising calls for tighter regulation from both conservatives and liberals and growing scrutiny of their sheer market dominance. Twitter’s general counsel will testify publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week, alongside executives from Facebook and Google.
Last month, Facebook said it would adopt new rules to bring greater transparency to advertising on its platform. Earlier this week, Twitter said it would add new labels to political ads on the service, identifying the ads’ sponsors.
But representatives of Facebook and Google declined to say whether they would follow Twitter’s lead in banning RT and Sputnik advertising. Both companies have recently disclosed that Russian agents purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of advertising on their platforms during the campaign.
Lawmakers who have been pressuring Twitter to address Russian entities’ use of the platform to influence American politics praised the company’s decision on Thursday — but cautioned that it would not be enough.
“I appreciate the effort, although RT and Sputnik have been known entities for some time,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has emerged as one of Twitter’s most vocal critics on Capitol Hill. “What I hope is we’ll see enhanced efforts on discovering other fake accounts as well as avatars that might not be as obvious.”
Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and John McCain of Arizona, who introduced bipartisan legislation earlier this month that would force Facebook, Google and other technology companies to disclose who is purchasing online political advertising, said the action only underscored the need for a new, across-the-board standard for social media companies to follow when it comes to political advertising.
“Twitter’s announcement today is a positive step, but one company preventing two outlets — RT and Sputnik — from placing ads on its platform is not a substitute” for government regulation, Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement.
Twitter, with 328 million monthly active users, is far smaller than Facebook, and has struggled more to find growth and financial stability. In September, the company’s vice president for policy, Colin Crowell, met with staff from House and Senate intelligence committees and shared copies of advertisements run on Twitter by RT’s three principal Twitter accounts. In a public statement, Twitter said that RT had purchased about $274,100 in advertising aimed at United States markets in 2016, promoting close to 2,000 Tweets.
On Wednesday, Twitter provided additional information, disclosing that Twitter had earned a total of $1.9 million in advertising revenue from RT since 2011. The company said it would now donate the money to research into the civic impact of Twitter, as well as its abuse by purveyors of fake news and propaganda.
Despite the sharp response from RT and Russian authorities, it is unclear how much impact Twitter’s decision will have on the growing threat of fake news and disinformation across its platform. Much of the Russian-sponsored activity surrounding the United States election did not involve advertising by official Russian outlets, but covert intervention: undercover human “trolls” on social media, Facebook pages impersonating American activists, and networks of automated Twitter accounts designed to amplify real and made-up news.
“I think it’s only a drop in the bucket,” said Nina Jankowicz, an expert on Russian disinformation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “What’s far more dangerous and expansive than RT and Sputnik’s ad buys is the content and messaging promoted by the Russian bot network active on Twitter, which doesn’t need to buy a single ad to garner impressions and interactions sometimes numbering in the thousands.”
Moreover, Twitter’s decision to limit RT and Sputnik could raise questions about how Twitter — and rival social media companies — treat other state-run or state-subsidized news organizations operating on their platforms. Across the world, governments have made aggressive use of Twitter and Facebook to drive their own messaging and propaganda. China, for example, while banning Facebook within its own country, has flooded the platform with advertising and paid propaganda and used it to promote its state broadcaster, CCTV.
A Twitter spokeswoman said the company’s decision on RT and Sputnik was informed by specific findings of the United States intelligence community, made public in January, and would not affect other government-sponsored outlets.
“This is not about being a state-sponsored news organization,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “It’s about the behavior of RT and Sputnik during the 2016 election.”