The Tenet Media Incident – Columbia Journalism Review

Influencers sit in the front row in this election cycle. They have been invited to party conventions, rallies and even the White House; President Biden has called them the “new news source.” This “royal treatment,” as the Associated Press put it last month, stems from the fact that influencers may be able to sway votes. And that, of course, carries the potential for manipulation. This week, for example, Semafor reported that a mysterious network was paying influencers to spread sexual smears about Kamala Harris. The prizes were generous; one participant earned more than twenty thousand dollars over several weeks by promoting certain messages. And in an even larger plot uncovered last week, the Justice Department alleged that Russia funded six unsuspecting right-wing US influencers – who collectively have millions of followers – to spread pro-Kremlin arguments in the run-up to the election.

The charges dropped by the Justice Department caused a stir in left and right media circles, not only because of their alarming content, but also because the case was so bizarre – in the words of The AtlanticAccording to Tom Nichols of the New York Times, the plot resembles “a bad sitcom rather than a first-rate intelligence operation.” According to the indictment filed by U.S. federal authorities, two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled news channel, helped launder $10 million in payments to a Tennessee-based media company that is not named in the indictment but is widely known in the press as Tenet Media. The company was founded by two conservative media personalities: Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Prosecutors say Chen and Donovan knew RT was funding the company but went to considerable lengths to conceal it. The co-founders also failed to register with the U.S. attorney general as agents of a foreign principal, which is required by law. However, neither is the subject of criminal charges, according to the CBC. (Chen and Donovan have not yet commented publicly on the allegations.)

After the launch, RT staff reportedly told Chen their 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 “their talent” – and offered them a staggering sum of money if they signed up. The influencers, including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, were hired to post original content on Tenet's platform. For their services, one of the influencers received four hundred thousand dollars per month, a one hundred thousand dollar sign-on bonus and an additional performance bonus.

The influencers allegedly did not know how the company was funded, although there were several warning signs. The Russians created a fictitious investor persona named “Eduard Grigoriann.” (Eduard, interestingly, means “wealthy guardian” in Old English.) Some of the influencers raised concerns when “Grigoriann” failed to produce 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 resume that appeared to mimic that of a European aristocrat. It included descriptions of Grigoriann’s career as a “successful finance professional” alongside an elaborate picture of him looking out the window of his private jet. Prosecutors claim Pool became suspicious because the resume mentioned Grigoriann’s involvement in “social justice” initiatives — a term typically associated with liberals. Despite this, the influencers eventually agreed to sign contracts. Tenet Media officially launched on November 8, 2023, about a year before the presidential election.

Since then, Tenet has produced over two thousand videos that have been viewed over sixteen million times on YouTube alone. “Although the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the themes and content of the videos often align with the Russian government's interest in reinforcing domestic political divisions in the United States in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian government interests, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment states. A day after the indictment was published, Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced his support for Harris, which some media outlets described as an attempt at trolling. (US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is clearly trying to help Trump in the election.)

How successful the Russians were in spreading pro-Kremlin arguments about Tenet remains unclear. After the charges became public, Wired downloaded hundreds of Tenet's (now removed) YouTube videos and compiled a list of frequently mentioned terms using subtitles. The study found that in hundreds of the videos, influencers focused on topics like Elon Musk and alleged racism against white people. It did not find that influencers were particularly focused on the war in Ukraine (the latter word appeared about as often as “Christianity”). Instead, influencers emphasized highly divisive culture war themes in the videos, which had titles like “Trans widows are a thing and it's getting out of control” and “Race is biological but gender isn't???”

The Russians were reportedly frustrated that the influencers were too focused on promoting their own social media brands rather than Tenet Media's. “At least one share a day. Not one share a week,” one of the RT employees demanded. To increase the pressure, the RT employee invented a second fake persona to repeat the same demands in the influencers' group chat. Later, arguments arose over whether to post a video of Tucker Carlson visiting a Russian grocery store and marveling at coin-operated shopping carts there as if they were an advanced form of technology. “They want me to post this,” Pool wrote in an internal chat. But “it just feels like blatant advertising.”

The Tenet system appears to be part of the Russian government's broader, ongoing effort to infiltrate the American psyche. In another action, the Justice Department seized over thirty web domains associated with a Russian campaign called “Doppelgänger,” which spreads disinformation by imitating legitimate U.S. websites (one example: registering the washingtonpost.pm domain as a mimic of washingtonpost.com). The fake websites have spread propaganda to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters, according to the Russian government. Politico.

The allegations evoke a sense of déjà vu from the two previous election cycles. In 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies found that Putin had ordered an influence campaign aimed at polarizing public discourse and undermining the integrity of the U.S. electoral process. Similar tactics — and new ones — were used in the run-up to the 2020 election, which Trump, of course, lost. This election cycle, as the U.S. Department of Justice allegations show, is by no means immune to interference. Earlier this summer, intelligence officials disrupted a covert Russian influence operation that relied on artificial intelligence to spread propaganda, according to the New York TimesThe Justice Department has deleted nearly a thousand fake accounts created by the Russian government after its attack on Ukraine in 2022.

The Tenet revelations show how Russian interference tactics have evolved again. The Atlantic'Charlie Warzel argues that instead of 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 on the line; as Warzel put it, “Who needs a troll farm when you can hire trolls with their own built-in audiences?” Combined with the rapid development of AI tools, influence campaigns are becoming faster and less labor-intensive compared to the 2016 election.

Of course, the influencers don't agree. Pool claimed in an article on X last week that he and the others were “victims” of the plot described in the indictment, should it prove true: “At no point did anyone other than me have full editorial control over the show, and the content of the show is often apolitical,” he said. Wired But analysis shows that the most common two-word terms in Tenet's YouTube videos – including “Supreme Court,” “illegal immigrants,” “White House,” “civil war” and “free speech” – are anything but apolitical. Last month, Pool referred to Ukraine as “the enemy” of the United States.

RT, for its part, reacted sarcastically to the accusation. Margarita Simonyan, the channel's editor-in-chief, wrote on Telegram that the US had “no other strategy than to spread panic about the all-powerful RT.” In a statement to Reuters and CNN, RT said: “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT's interference in the US elections.” The channel's press office also said: “Hahahaha!”

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Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen is a computational investigative fellow at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She works on a range of computational projects on the digital media landscape, including influence operations conducted across news media and the information ecosystem. She graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with a master's degree in data journalism.