Influencers have front-row seats this election cycle. They have been invited to party conventions, rallies, and even the White House; President Biden has called them the “new source of news.” This “royal treatment,” as the Associated Press put it last month, stems from the fact that influencers may be able to swing votes. And this, of course, presents the potential for manipulation. This week, for instance, Semafor reported that a mysterious network paid influencers to promote sexual smears about Kamala Harris. The rates were generous; one participant made more than twenty thousand dollars over several weeks by boosting certain messages. And, in an even bigger scheme revealed last week, the Department of Justice alleged that Russia has been funding six unwitting right-wing US influencers—who collectively have millions of followers—with the goal of pushing Kremlin-friendly talking points ahead of the election.
The allegations dropped by the DOJ created a splash in both left- and right-wing media circles, not only because of their alarming content, but because the case was so bizarre—in the words of The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, the scheme seems more like a “bad sitcom pitch than a top-notch intelligence operation.” According to the federal indictment, two employees from RT, a Russian state-controlled news network, helped launder ten million dollars in payments to a Tennessee-based media company that was not named in the indictment but has been widely identified in the press as Tenet Media. The company was founded by two conservative media personalities: Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Prosecutors say that Chen and Donovan knew that RT was funding the company but made a significant effort to conceal it. The cofounders also did not register with the US attorney general as an agent of a foreign principal, which is required by law. Neither of them, however, are the subject of criminal charges, according to the CBC. (Chen and Donovan have yet to speak publicly about the allegations.)
Following the launch, the RT employees allegedly told Chen that her first task was to find “the face” of the new media company. Without disclosing how the company was funded, Chen approached the six right-wing influencers—referred to as “its talent”—and offered them an astonishing amount of money to sign on. The influencers, who included Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin, were tasked with posting original content on Tenet’s platform. For their services, one of the influencers was paid four hundred thousand dollars per month, a hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus, and an additional performance bonus.
The influencers were allegedly unaware of how the company was funded, although one can argue there were several red flags. The Russians created a fictional investor personality with the name of “Eduard Grigoriann.” (Eduard, interestingly, means “wealthy guard” in Old English.) Some of the influencers raised concerns when “Grigoriann” didn’t produce any Google results and because his name was repeatedly misspelled in at least four separate emails; to smooth things over, the Russians allegedly created a fake résumé seemingly intended to mimic that of a European aristocrat, including descriptions of Grigoriann’s career as an “accomplished finance professional” alongside a lavish image of him looking out the window of his private jet. Prosecutors allege that Pool grew suspicious that the résumé mentioned Grigoriann’s involvement with “social justice” initiatives—a term typically associated with liberals. Still, the influencers eventually agreed to sign contracts. Tenet Media was officially launched on November 8, 2023, roughly a year prior to the presidential election.
Since then, Tenet has produced over two thousand videos that have garnered more than sixteen million views on YouTube alone. “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 U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment says. The day after the indictment was unsealed, Russian president Vladimir Putin voiced support for Harris, in what some outlets described as a trolling attempt. (US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is clearly trying to boost Trump in the election.)
Exactly how successful the Russians were at promoting pro-Kremlin talking points through Tenet remains unclear, however. After the indictment was made public, Wired downloaded hundreds of Tenet’s (now removed) YouTube videos and used closed captions to compile a list of frequently mentioned terms. The investigation found that the influencers focused on topics like Elon Musk and supposed racism toward white people in hundreds of the videos. It did not find that the influencers were particularly focused on the war in Ukraine (the latter word appeared about as often as “Christianity”). Instead, the influencers stressed highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which had titles like “Trans Widows Are a Thing and It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Biological but Gender Isn’t???”
The Russians allegedly grew frustrated that the influencers focused too much on promoting their own social media brands, rather than Tenet Media. “At least one share per day. Not one share per week,” one of the RT employees ordered. To add more pressure, the RT employee invented a second fake persona that echoed the same demands in the influencers’ group chat. Later, arguments formed about whether to post a video of Tucker Carlson visiting a Russian grocery store, where he marveled at coin-operated carts as if they were an advanced form of technology. “They want me to publish this,” Pool wrote in an internal chat. But “it just feels like overt shilling.”
The Tenet scheme appears to be part of the Russian government’s broader, ongoing effort to infiltrate the American psyche. In another action, the DOJ seized over thirty Web domains linked to a Russian campaign known as “Doppelganger,” which spreads disinformation by mimicking legitimate US websites (one example: registering the domain washingtonpost.pm to mimic washingtonpost.com). The fake websites have pushed Russian government propaganda to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters, according to Politico.
The allegations bring a sense of déjà vu from the two previous election cycles. In 2016, US intelligence agencies found that Putin ordered an influence campaign with the aim of polarizing public discourse and undermining the integrity of the US electoral process. Similar tactics—and new ones—were deployed in the run-up to the 2020 election, which Trump, of course, lost. This election cycle, as the DOJ allegations demonstrate, is hardly immune to meddling. Earlier this summer, intelligence officials disrupted a covert Russian influence operation that relied on artificial intelligence to spread propaganda, according to the New York Times. The DOJ took down nearly a thousand inauthentic accounts that the Russian government created after its attack on Ukraine in 2022.
The Tenet revelations demonstrate how Russian interference tactics have evolved again, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel argues. Rather than relying on bots and paid trolls, state actors can exploit established social media influencers, who may not ask questions when generous sums of money are involved; as Warzel put it, “Who needs a troll farm when you can rent trolls with their own built-in audiences?” Combined with the rapid development of AI tools, influence campaigns are becoming quicker and less labor-intensive compared with the 2016 election.
Not that the influencers agree, of course. Writing on X last week, Pool claimed that he and the others were “victims” of the scheme outlined in the indictment, should it prove to be true: “Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show and the contents of the show are often apolitical,” he said. The Wired analysis shows, however, that the most frequent two-word phrases in Tenet’s YouTube videos—including “Supreme Court,” “illegal immigrants,” “White House,” “civil war,” and “free speech”—are hardly apolitical. Last month, Pool referred to Ukraine as “the enemy” of the United States.
For its part, RT responded sarcastically to the indictment. Writing on Telegram, Margarita Simonyan, the broadcaster’s editor in chief, said that the US doesn’t “have any other strategies except to scaremonger about the almighty RT.” In a statement, RT told Reuters and CNN that “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and RT’s interference in the US elections.” Its press office also said: “Hahahaha!”
Other notable stories:
- The fallout continues from Tuesday night’s debate. Dialing into Fox & Friends yesterday morning, Donald Trump once again attacked ABC News, which hosted the debate, at one point suggesting that the network ought to lose its license; he also sounded noncommittal about doing another debate (unless one of his favored Fox opinion hosts were lined up to moderate, which isn’t going to happen). Elsewhere, Semafor explored the relationship between Trump and Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” after she traveled with Trump to the debate. And in her newsletter, Heated, Emily Atkin criticized ABC for saving a climate question “for the last possible moment of the 90-minute event” and only giving the candidates one minute each to respond.
- The Washington Post investigated the killing of Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American woman who was shot at a demonstration in the occupied West Bank last week; the Israeli military has suggested that a soldier killed Eygi “unintentionally” amid a “violent riot,” but the Post found that she was shot long after “the height of confrontations.” In related news, the editorial board of the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz called on officials to allow outside journalists to enter Gaza, arguing that keeping them out not only curbs coverage of the war there but also precludes “real-time scrutiny of Hamas’s claims—a key Israeli interest.” And +972 Magazine explored how “fake Israeli intelligence” about the war made it into two foreign newspapers.
- In other international press-freedom news, Joel Reyes, the former governor of Palawan, in the Philippines, surrendered to stand trial over the murder of Gerry Ortega, a journalist who covered corruption in Reyes’s administration before being killed in 2011. Elsewhere, a court in Vietnam sentenced Nguyen Vu Binh, a journalist who has contributed to the US-backed broadcaster Radio Free Asia, to seven years in prison; critics have decried the case as a sham. And Reporters Without Borders teamed up with the French magazine Society to produce the “Prison Papers,” a series of articles profiling eight jailed journalists worldwide.
- Ahead of the release of Lee—a new movie starring Kate Winslet as Lee Miller, the pioneering photographer and war reporter—Judith Mackrell writes for The Guardian about Miller and the other women journalists who broke the rules and risked their lives to cover the Second World War. The journalists were seen as “too fragile” to cover conflict—and “muddled along with that was the more banally practical issue of toilet facilities,” Mackrell writes, with officials balking at the idea of the women relieving themselves among male soldiers.
- And Netflix revealed in court this week that Rachel Williams—a onetime friend of the scam artist Anna Sorokin, who is suing the streamer over her portrayal in its dramatized series about Sorokin—is trying to obtain the private notes of Jessica Pressler, the journalist whose reporting on Sorokin for New York magazine inspired the Netflix show. Pressler has pushed back on the request as a threat to the confidentiality of sources; Business Insider’s Jacob Shamsian has more details.
ICYMI: A review of the ABC debate
Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen is a computational investigative fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She works on a range of computational projects on the digital media landscape, including influence operations conducted through news media and the information ecosystem. She graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with an MS degree in data journalism.