In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media.
By November 2023, they had already brought together big conservative social media stars, such as Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to publish original content on the Tenet platform. The site then began publishing hundreds of videos - featuring scathing political commentary and conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia's war with Ukraine - that were promoted across the social media spectrum, from YouTube to TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram and Rumble.
It was all, federal prosecutors now say, a covert Russian influence operation. On Wednesday, the Justice Department charged two Russians with helping orchestrate $10 million in payments to Tenet in a scheme to use those stars to spread pro-Kremlin messages.
The revelations reflect the growing sophistication of the Kremlin's long-standing efforts to shape American public opinion and advance Russia's geopolitical objectives, including, according to American intelligence assessments, the election of former President Donald J. Trump in November.
In 2016 and 2020, Russia employed armies of internet trolls, fake accounts, and bot farms to try to reach the American public, with debatable success. The operation prosecutors described this week shows a shift toward exploiting already established social media influencers, who, in this case, generated up to 16 million views on Tenet's YouTube channel alone.
Presumably, most viewers did not know, as the influencers themselves said, that Russia was paying for all of this.
“Influencers already have a level of t...
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