In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice says was funded and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.
Using the closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we compiled lists of terms that were frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:
The content of these videos was described by prosecutors as “consistent” with Russia’s aim to sow political unrest in the US. Areas covered include: free speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, perceived racism toward white people, and Elon Musk.
Although an indictment unsealed earlier this week did not name Tenet, WIRED and other outlets identified it because prosecutors gave its motto as a business identified as “US Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of the Russian state-backed network RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, made payments to Tenet and its parent company of $9.7 million to produce and distribute. videos that support Russian causes. Most of that money reportedly went to Tenet’s network of popular influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
Influencers are not accused by the government of wrongdoing. Johnson, Pool, Rubin, and fellow talents Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen have issued statements denying awareness of the alleged Russian influence scheme and portraying themselves as its victims. (They did not respond to requests for comment.) Prosecutors said right-wing personality Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who founded Tenet—the two, who were not charged with any crime, was not named in the indictment but was tied to the business through company records—they found they were working with the Russians and failed to register “as an agent of a foreign principal, as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who have not been charged, did not inform influencers or other Tenet employees about the source of their funding.
However, Afanasyeva, using fake personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting of (Tenet) hundreds of videos,” the indictment said. The indictment does not identify specific videos as allegedly influenced by RT employees, but prosecutors say they were closely involved in Tenet’s editorial process: “Although the views expressed in the videos are inconsistently, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Russian Government’s interest in strengthening US domestic divisions to undermine US opposition to the Russian Government’s core interests, such as its ongoing war with Ukraine.”
To determine what was specifically suspected to be funded by the Russian government, WIRED downloaded closed captioning transcripts from 405 long-form videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you can access the file here—and use natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts represent almost all of the long-form videos available on the channel. We were unable to review approximately 1,600 YouTube shorts before the channel was removed from the site. We analyzed the data looking for the most frequently occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in each video, excluding words like “um” that don’t have much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)
This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers are specifically focused on the war in Ukraine—the word “Ukraine” appears in the transcripts 67 times, almost as often as “misinformation,” “Christianity, ” and “Clinton.” It shows influencers highlighting culture war topics in videos, with titles like “Trans Widows Are a Thing and It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Biological But Gender Isn’t? ??” The word “trans” appears 152 times, and “transgender” 98.
