In hundreds of videos Since YouTube removed itAccording to a WIRED analysis, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media — a company the US Department of Justice says was funded and run by a state-backed Russian news network — showed interest in a very specific set of topics.
Using subtitles from videos we downloaded before they were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:
Prosecutors described the content of the videos as “consistent” with Russia’s goals of sowing political discord in the United States. Topics covered include freedom of speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, alleged racism against whites and Elon Musk.
While An accusation The document, which was released earlier this week, doesn’t name Tenet, but WIRED and other outlets were able to identify it because prosecutors gave the motto as that of a company identified as “US Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of the state-backed Russian broadcaster RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Tenet and its parent company $9.7 million to produce and distribute videos supporting Russian goals. 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, Rubinand talented colleagues Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen Prosecutors claim that right-wing personality Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian citizens who founded Tenet (the two, who have not been charged with any crimes, are not named in the indictment but are linked to the company through corporate records) knew they were working with Russians and failed to register “as agents of a foreign principal, as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the couple, who have not been charged, failed to inform influencers and other Tenet employees about the source of their funding.
Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, using false identities, “edited, published, and directed the publication by[Tenet]of hundreds of videos,” the indictment says. The indictment does not identify specific videos as allegedly influenced by 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 Russian government’s interest in amplifying internal U.S. divisions to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian government interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”
To determine what exactly the Russian government allegedly funded, WIRED downloaded the closed-caption transcripts of 405 full-length videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel. You can access the archive here here—and used natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts represent nearly all of the long-form videos available on the channel. We were unable to analyze approximately 1,600 YouTube Shorts before the channel was removed from the site. We analyzed the data for the two-, three-, and four-word phrases that appeared most frequently in each video, excluding words like “um” that don’t have much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)
This analysis doesn’t show that influencers in these videos were particularly fixated on the Ukraine war (the word “Ukraine” appears in the transcripts 67 times, almost as often as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton”). It does show that 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 Hand” and “Race is Biological, but Gender Isn’t?” The word “trans” appears 152 times, and “transgender” 98 times.