In a whole bunch 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 subjects, 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 continuously talked about in them, together with a searchable database:
The content material of those movies was described by prosecutors as “constant” with Russia’s purpose of sowing 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 title Tenet, WIRED and different shops had been in a position to 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 workers 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 supply and distribute movies supporting Russian goals. The overwhelming majority of that cash allegedly went to Tenet’s community of widespread influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
The influencers aren’t accused by the federal government of wrongdoing. 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. (They haven’t responded to requests for remark.) 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 didn’t 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 workers concerning the supply of their funding.
Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, utilizing pretend personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting by [Tenet] of a whole bunch of movies,” the indictment says. The indictment doesn’t determine particular movies as allegedly influenced by the RT workers, however prosecutors say they had been intimately concerned in Tenet’s editorial course of: “Whereas the views expressed within the movies aren’t uniform, the subject material and content material of the movies are sometimes in line with the Authorities of Russia’s curiosity in amplifying US home divisions so as to weaken US opposition to core Authorities of Russia pursuits, corresponding to its ongoing conflict in Ukraine.”
To find out what particularly the Russian authorities is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 long-form movies posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you’ll be able to entry the file right here—and used pure language processing to determine widespread themes. These 405 video transcripts symbolize almost each long-form video obtainable on the channel. We weren’t in a position to analyze roughly 1,600 YouTube shorts earlier than the channel was faraway from the positioning. We analyzed the information searching for essentially the most continuously occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in every video, excluding phrases like “um” that don’t carry a lot which means. (“Um” seems within the dataset 2,340 occasions.)
This evaluation doesn’t present that in these movies the influencers had been significantly fixated on the Ukraine conflict—the phrase “Ukraine” seems within the transcripts 67 occasions, about as typically as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does present the influencers stressing extremely divisive tradition conflict subjects 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 occasions, and “transgender” 98.