In a blog post published today, a spokesperson for Twitter announced that the company has decided to block paid advertisement posts by Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik. "Twitter has made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, effective immediately," the post stated.

The bans are the result of "retrospective work" done by Twitter's global public policy team to investigate the use of the service during the 2016 presidential elections to conduct state-sponsored influence campaigns. The US intelligence community found "that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election on behalf of the Russian government," the Twitter spokesperson wrote.

"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 post states. "Early this year, the US intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter."

The decision by Twitter executives does not ban RT and Sputnik from having accounts on Twitter, nor does it block their "organic" posts. But it does prevent them from reaching out to a wider audience through sponsored "tweets."

According to Twitter, RT is estimated to have paid $1.9 million for global advertising to Twitter since it began advertising through the service, including $274,100 in US-targeted advertising in 2016. Twitter will "donate those funds to support external research into the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections," the post announced, "including use of malicious automation and misinformation with an initial focus on elections and automation. We will have more details to share on this disbursement soon."

The action does not target any other Russian advertisers. It also does not address the "bot" accounts that amplify messages posted by RT and Sputnik. In September, Twitter identified 22 accounts that matched up with some of the 470 accounts identified by Facebook as "bot" accounts; many had already been identified as bots and had been banned, and those that remained were shut down.

Meanwhile, RT has claimed that Twitter actually approached the outlet with a proposal to run even more RT advertising during the election. RT's deputy editor Kirill Karnovich-Valua says that RT turned down the proposal.