A WIRED analysis found that in hundreds of videos since removed by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media — which the Justice Department says was funded and directed by a Russian state-run news network — expressed interest in a very specific set of topics.
Using the closed captions from the videos, which I downloaded before they were removed, I created a list and searchable database of terms frequently mentioned in the videos.
Prosecutors said the content of the videos was “consistent” with Russia’s objective of sowing political discord in the United States, including areas such as free speech, illegal immigration, diversity in video games, anti-white racism and Elon Musk.
Tenet was not named in the indictment unsealed earlier this week, but WIRED and other outlets were able to identify the company because prosecutors cited its corporate motto as “US Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of Russian state broadcaster RT, Kostyantin Kalashnikov and Yelena Afanasyeva, who were indicted on charges of money laundering conspiracy and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Tenet and its parent company $9.7 million to produce and distribute videos supporting Russian causes. Most of that money allegedly went to Tenet’s network of popular influencers, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
The influencers did not respond to requests for comment (Johnson, Poole, Rubin, and fellow talents Taylor Hansen and Matt Christiansen issued statements denying they were aware of the alleged Russian-influenced scheme and claiming to be victims of it), but they have not been accused of wrongdoing by the government. Prosecutors say that right-wing talent Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who founded Tenet (who have not been charged with any crimes and are not named in the indictment but are linked to the business through corporate records), knew they were working with Russians but did not register “as agents of a foreign principal as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who were not charged, failed to inform influencers and other Tenet employees about the source of the funds.
Nonetheless, Afanasyeva used false identities to “edit, post and direct the posting of hundreds of videos by (Tenet),” the indictment states. While the indictment does not identify the specific videos that RT employees were allegedly influenced by, prosecutors say they were heavily involved in Tenet’s editing process. “While the opinions expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Russian government’s interests of widening divisions within the United States in order to weaken U.S. opposition to its core interests, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine.”
To determine what specifically the Russian government allegedly funded, WIRED downloaded closed-caption transcripts for 405 full-length videos posted to the Tenet YouTube channel (files can be accessed here) and used natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts cover nearly all full-length videos available on the channel. We were able to analyze approximately 1,600 short YouTube videos before the channel was removed from the site. We analyzed the data to find the two-, three-, and four-word phrases that appeared most frequently in each video, excluding less meaningful words like “um” (“Um” appears 2,340 times in the dataset).
The analysis does not indicate that the influencers were particularly preoccupied with the Ukraine war in these videos. The word “Ukraine” appears 67 times in the transcripts, roughly the same frequency as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does show that the influencers highlight highly divisive culture war topics in their videos. Videos have titles like “Transgender Widows Are Real and Getting Out of Hand” and “Race Is Biological, Gender Isn’t???.” The word “trans” appears 152 times and “transgender” 98 times.
