You Are Probably Consuming Russian Propaganda

And regardless of your political identity, Putin's information warfare is working on you.

The issue of foreign influence in American politics has taken center stage over the past few years. Despite all the attention, our adversaries have only become more emboldened. A recent Department of Justice release highlights an alarming chapter in Russia’s ongoing information warfare: Tenet Media, an American right-wing content machine funded covertly by the Russian government. Their goals extend beyond influencing elections –they seek to actively distort our domestic political landscape, pitting Americans against one another to weaken the country from within. 

Having spent years working in the intelligence community with experience in information warfare, I’ve seen firsthand how powerful these tactics can be. Russia’s recruitment of Tenet Media underscores a much larger and more troubling issue than simple partisan squabbles. From my experience, the scale of this problem is far greater than we realize. What’s worse is that the effects of this information warfare–deepening social and political divides–inherently complicate our collective ability to fight back. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets and the harder it is to solve. If our partisan identities prevent us from addressing this threat, we will continue to fracture and weaken from within. 

Overview of DoJ Release and Tenet Media

From DoJ affidavit: Russian talking points given to Tenet Media

The unsealed affidavit pulls back the curtain on a shadowy operation that funneled nearly $10 million from the Russian government into a right-wing digital influencer network operating in the U.S. The payments came from RT, formerly known as Russia Today, which closed shop in the U.S. due to sanctions. The DoJ alleges the payments were part of a broader strategy to manipulate U.S. public opinion and paid directly to Lauren Chen, CEO of Tenet Media. Shockingly, the DoJ alleges that Russian agents were intimately involved in the editorial process for much of Tenet’s content, which included Russian nationals personally editing and posting over 2,000 videos on Tenet’s YouTube channel.  A more in-depth analysis of the situation can be read here from the New York Times or here from Reuters. 

The scale of influence is alarming. Prominent right-wing influencers like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin received payments totaling as much as $400,000 a month per influencer, regurgitating talking points written by the Kremlin in videos edited and published by Russian agents. These content creators, knowingly or not, became foreign assets, disseminating narratives designed to divide the American public, promote conflict, and exacerbate partisan divides. 

What Russia Was Paying For

The influencers in question are not minor players in the Fifth Estate. With millions of combined followers across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter/X, they hold significant sway in the right-wing media landscape. They’ve built their brands on ideas of free speech, fighting the mainstream media, and exposing the evils of liberalism and cancel culture. They both echo mainstream GOP talking points and create new ones by throwing out new arguments while Republican strategists pay attention to what gets traction. They’re influential to both the general public and the Republican Party elites. 

The Russian talking points, pictured above, instructed the influencers to focus on some of America’s most powerful dividers: race, immigration, and economic uncertainty. What’s interesting is that Russia’s most important issue, America’s support for Ukraine, is not the main focus. This was not just about furthering short-term Russian interests; it was a much more nebulous effort to generate abstract discord, conflict, and division among us. Russia was telling these influencers to focus on issues that make their viewers fearful, upset, and angry at partisan enemies. 

So how, exactly, did this Russian influence manifest itself in online content? Therein lies the problem: it’s hard to tell. These talking points aren’t just (literally) given to them by Russian agents; they are already mainstays of right-wing influencer content. The talking points aren’t new, they are just the most divisive and frightening ones that exist among right-wing media. 

Russia isn’t paying them to promote tax cuts or balance the budget; they are paying them to incite racial resentment and make you feel unsafe. The seamless integration of these narratives makes it incredibly difficult to discern where genuine American political discourse ends and where Russian influence begins. This is a textbook example of why covert information warfare is so difficult to stop. 

There are, however, some examples that are obvious in hindsight. Tim Pool, for one, found himself explicitly amplifying Russian narratives about Ukraine mere days after his first Kremlin-signed paycheck. Pool talks about how Ukraine is “America’s real enemy” and, somehow, “our biggest threat.” He opines that our support for the country is intolerable and that our demonization of Russia is unfounded and wrong. A clip of the video is liked here. 

YouTube thumbnail of video by Lauren Chen, CEO of Tenet Media

Beyond Ukraine, all the influencers mentioned in the affidavit frequently speak about the dangers that immigrants pose to the American way of life and how minorities in America are committing violent crimes at unprecedented levels. They frequently highlight the economic hardships that white Americans face today, and how the Democratic Party is purposefully supporting illegal immigrants and people of color while they abandon lower and middle-class white Americans; these influencers’ main audience. 

WIRED magazine published a data analysis of Tenet Media’s YouTube videos, showing the most commonly used phrases and words among the content posted while they received Russian money. Considering Russia’s involvement in choosing what content to post on their channels, the substance of these videos gives us an important glimpse into what Russia prioritizes in this information warfare strategy.

It shows the editors were only vaguely interested in Ukraine, which is mentioned 67 times in the over 400 videos included in the study, compared to the words “trans” and “transgender,” which earned over 200 mentions. They focused on hot-button issues of social divides and racial resentment, reinforcing a feeling of conflict and animosity. Among the most common phrases in the videos were “white people,” “black people,” “civil war,” and “illegal immigrants.” 

Source

Despite the DoJ indictment, the influencers who were involved remain active on all platforms, continuing to pump out the same divisive content despite their revealed connections. Even if the principal agent, Tenet Media CEO Lauren Chen, has been removed, the talking points she helped spread are still alive and well. The narratives have already taken root, and the damage to our political discourse continues. 

For influencers like Pool and Johnson, the damage is done. Their stance on Ukraine, which aligns closely with Russian interests, combined with their focus on promoting racial and cultural conflict, served to deepen partisan division in the U.S. The constant drumbeat of conflict–whether about immigration, race, wokeness, etc.–does more than just polarize audiences. It fosters a climate of hopelessness and anger, leaving little room for meaningful political dialogue. With partisan divides as deep as they are today, along with the politicization of Russia’s influence as a topic in American politics, we are left unable to meaningfully combat it. 

For Russia, this is a win. By amplifying discord in the U.S., they weaken us from the inside out. While they may succeed in reducing public support for Ukraine, their broader goal is to destabilize American society and, frankly, they’re succeeding. The genius of these information warfare operations is that they aren’t about changing personal stances on specific issues–they’re about fostering an environment where everyone is suspicious, angry, fearful, and divided. 

What Does it Mean For Us?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s highly unlikely that this is the only instance of Russian money making its way into our media. The DoJ affidavit claims that Russia maintains an active list of over 2,800 influencers, signaling that the Tenet Media recruitment is likely part of a much larger effort to influence our information ecosystem. 

Unfortunately, it has become difficult to rally the public around these issues. The question of Russian influence has itself become politicized, with Fox News calling the DoJ release ‘fake news’ and other right-wing influencers shrugging their shoulders in a coordinated fashion. Without any non-DoJ accountability, this problem becomes nearly impossible to solve. If people are willing to accept Russian money to spread their propaganda, the problem becomes a game of whack-a-mole where the DoJ tries, fruitlessly, to stop the inflow of cash and hold people accountable. There simply aren’t enough resources to categorically prevent Russian money from finding its way in, and a significant portion of the public either doesn’t care about the story, or believes it to be false. 

So what happens next? How can we, as a nation, resist foreign influence over our media? Frankly, the answer is complicated and the solution feels unattainable. We have to decide, collectively, that it is intolerable to allow foreign nations to maliciously manipulate what we see and hear day to day online. We also have to want to be more unified against information meant to divide us.

That may seem easy to do, but it gets much harder when the manipulated media echoes arguments and talking points that help your preferred political party or align with your personal views. After all, it isn’t just Russia propping up hardline right-wing talking points. The intelligence community has warned us of Iranian digital influence to weaken public support for Israel, as well as Israeli digital influence operations aimed at strengthening their support and isolating their critics. Given the polarity and sensitivity of that issue, it’s difficult to imagine us banding together across the divide. 

But regardless of where you stand on the issue, the influence itself should give us pause. Non-traditional media and the rise of the Fifth Estate has given businesses, lobbyists, political parties, and nation-states endless vectors to influence our mindsets and manipulate our opinions. Those vectors will always be there, but it’s up to us to resist the noise. The first step is to put the good of the nation over our partisan interests. In the world of information warfare, that would require a counter-narrative that challenges the negativity and toxicity that dominate our modern media landscape. People need a reason to feel hopeful, along with someone to communicate that reason to them. For now, all we have is hateful content about immigrants eating pets in Ohio, and collective outrage in response. Negativity dominates our news feed while Putin smiles in Moscow.