Twitter’s multi-million dollar US election pitch to RT revealed in FULL https://t.co/flh9GLg4f0 pic.twitter.com/ZKOntGvTat
— RT (@RT_com) October 27, 2017
Pushing back against Twitter, which announced this week that it would be banning ads on its platform from Russian media outfits RT and Sputnik, the editor of RT tweeted back at CEO Jack Dorsey telling him not to "forget" his company's pitch to them last April selling millions in ads on Twitter when he goes before a Congressional committee.
As the Associated Press reports, RT published a series of excerpts from Twitter's April 2016 pitch to them, and tweeted it as shown above. The pitch, which RT says it turned down, appears specifically geared toward advertising during the election cycle. They say the company was trying to sell them on purchasing millions of dollars in advertising and now the US Intelligence community believes that the state-sponsored RT was involved in trying to meddle in the US election, and Dorsey will be among several social media execs testifying on the topic before Congress next week.
Following the revelation of the pitch, editor in chief Margarita Simonyan tweeted the following:
Hope @jack won’t forget to tell @congressdotgov how @Twitter pitched @RT_com to spend big $$s on US elex ad campaign. pic.twitter.com/7GqoEoSaY8
— Маргарита Симоньян (@M_Simonyan) October 26, 2017
Per the AP, President Vladimir Putin also spoke out on Twitter's move to ban RT and Sputnik, via spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. Peskov reportedly said that the Kremlin is "sorry that Twitter seems to have fallen victim to profound prejudice against Russian media" and that Twitter's "discrimination of its clients" is worrisome. Peskov added that anything the media companies did on the platform during the last year "cannot be described as election meddling."