In a whole lot of movies since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—an organization the US Division of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian information community—confirmed curiosity in a extremely particular set of matters, in keeping with a WIRED evaluation.
Utilizing closed captioning of the movies we downloaded earlier than the movies had been eliminated, we have compiled lists of phrases incessantly talked about in them, together with a searchable database:
The content material of those movies was described by prosecutors as “constant” with Russia’s goals to sow political discord within the US. Among the many areas lined: free speech, unlawful immigrants, variety in video video games, supposed racism towards white folks, and Elon Musk.
Whereas an indictment unsealed earlier this week doesn’t identify Tenet, WIRED and different retailers had been capable of determine it as a result of prosecutors gave its motto as that of a enterprise recognized as “U.S. Firm-1.” Prosecutors allege that two staff of the state-backed Russian community RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who’re charged with conspiracy to commit cash laundering and to violate the Overseas Brokers Registration Act, paid Tenet and its mother or father firm $9.7 million to provide and distribute movies supporting Russian goals. The overwhelming majority of that cash allegedly went to Tenet’s community of common influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
The influencers—who haven’t responded to requests for remark (Johnson, Pool, Rubin, and fellow skills Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen issued statements denying consciousness of the alleged Russian affect scheme and portraying themselves as its victims)—will not be accused by the federal government of wrongdoing. Prosecutors say that right-wing persona Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who based Tenet—the 2, who haven’t been charged with any crime, go unnamed within the indictment, however are tied to the enterprise by means of company information—had been conscious they had been working with Russians and did not register “as an agent of a international principal, as required by regulation.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who weren’t indicted, didn’t inform the influencers or different Tenet staff in regards to the supply of their funding.
Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, utilizing faux personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting by [Tenet] of a whole lot of movies,” the indictment says. The indictment doesn’t determine particular movies as allegedly influenced by the RT staff, however prosecutors say they had been intimately concerned in Tenet’s editorial course of: “Whereas the views expressed within the movies will not be uniform, the subject material and content material of the movies are sometimes in step with the Authorities of Russia’s curiosity in amplifying US home divisions so as to weaken US opposition to core Authorities of Russia pursuits, reminiscent of its ongoing struggle in Ukraine.”
To find out what particularly the Russian authorities is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 longform movies posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you’ll be able to entry the file right here—and used pure language processing to determine frequent themes. These 405 video transcripts characterize practically each longform video out there on the channel. We weren’t capable of analyze roughly 1600 YouTube shorts earlier than the channel was faraway from the location. We analyzed the info searching for probably the most incessantly occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in every video, excluding phrases like “um” that don’t carry a lot that means. (“Um” seems within the dataset 2,340 instances.)
This evaluation doesn’t present that in these movies the influencers had been significantly fixated on the Ukraine struggle—the phrase “Ukraine” seems within the transcripts 67 instances, about as usually as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does present the influencers stressing extremely divisive tradition struggle matters within the movies, which carried titles like “Trans Widows Are A Factor And It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Organic However Gender Is not???” The phrase “trans” seems 152 instances, and “transgender” 98.
