In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.
Using closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:
The content of these videos was described by prosecutors as “consistent” with Russia’s aims to sow political discord in the US. Among the areas covered: free speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, supposed racism toward white people, and Elon Musk.
While an indictment unsealed earlier this week does not name Tenet, WIRED and other outlets were able to identify it because prosecutors gave its motto as that of a business identified as “U.S. Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of the state-backed Russian network RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Tenet and its parent company $9.7 million to produce and distribute videos supporting Russian aims. The vast majority of that money allegedly went to Tenet’s network of popular influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
The influencers—who have not responded to requests for comment (Johnson, Pool, Rubin, and fellow talents Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen issued statements denying awareness of the alleged Russian influence scheme and portraying themselves as its victims)—are not accused by the government of wrongdoing. Prosecutors say that right-wing personality Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who founded Tenet—the two, who have not been charged with any crime, go unnamed in the indictment, but are tied to the business through corporate records—were aware they were working with Russians and failed to register “as an agent of a foreign principal, as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who were not indicted, did not inform the influencers or other Tenet employees about the source of their funding.
Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, using fake personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting by [Tenet] of hundreds of videos,” the indictment says. The indictment does not identify specific videos as allegedly influenced by the RT employees, but prosecutors say they were intimately involved in Tenet’s editorial process: “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”
To determine what specifically the Russian government is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 longform videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you can access the file here—and used natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts represent nearly every longform video available on the channel. We were not able to analyze approximately 1600 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 carry much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)
This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine war—the word “Ukraine” appears in the transcripts 67 times, about as often as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried 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.
