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Two Russian nationals employed by RT have been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in the United States.
Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva are accused of funnelling almost $10 million to Tennessee-based company, Tenet Media, with the money flow being masked through shell companies in countries like Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Mauritius, and described as payments for electronics.
In a statement, the US Department of Justice, said that the Russian state broadcaster and its employees had used the funds to “pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to US audiences”, adding that it would not “tolerate foreign efforts to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division”.
The indictment was unsealed in the Southern District of New York on Wednesday and at that time, Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva were at large, the statement noted.
Tenet Media was founded in 2022 by prominent right-wing social media personalities Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, who is also president of the company,
Chen is a contributor to Charlie Kirk’s non-profit, Turning Point USA, wrote opinion pieces for RT between 2021 and 2022, and hosted a show on Glenn Beck’s, The Blaze, but was fired soon after the indictment was published.
Tenet Media employed some relatively big right-wing influencers and has more than 315,000 followers on YouTube, along with a strong presence on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
Their most popular content creators, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern, have a combined follower count on X of around seven million, and their 2,000 YouTube videos have amassed over 16 million views. The contracts these influencers made with the company were related to video production for YouTube.
Out of the $9.7 million allegedly received from RT, $8.7 million went to the content creators. One of them was allegedly paid $400,000 a month for four weekly video productions. The indictment states that the money received from RT “represents nearly 90%” of funds deposited to Tenet Media’s accounts. Most of the money was transferred through an unnamed UK-based shell company.
According to the indictment, Tenet Media founders knew that both Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva were Russian before they decided to work with them.
They told the YouTubers that their funding was coming from a Western European businessman called “Eduard Grigoriann”, who in reality was a fake persona created by the Russians.
The Russian operatives influenced the content posted by Tenet Media.
Afanasyeva, using aliases such as “Helena Shudra” and “Victoria Pesti”, allegedly “edited, posted, and directed the posting” by the company and “provided day-to-day direction” to its staff.
She requested the media company post Tucker Carlson’s visit to a Russian grocery store, even though one of the producers felt like it was “overt shilling”.
In another example, Afanasyeva told the company they should blame Ukraine for the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack, even though ISIS had previously claimed responsibility for the massacre. Chen replied that one of the influencers was “happy to cover it”.
According to another US Department of Justice indictment published on the same day, the Kremlin is conducting a “guerrilla campaign” in the US that focuses on topics such as high inflation, unaffordable food prices and essential goods, the threat of crime coming from people of colour and immigrants, and overspending on foreign policy, especially Ukraine.
These narratives were strongly present in the content created by the Tenet Media influencers, and many of them harshly criticised US foreign policy, and especially any aid to Ukraine.
Tim Pool stated on one of his videos that, “Ukraine is the enemy of this country,” and triggered the conflict with Russia by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline (even though Vladimir Putin had launched his full-scale invasion seven months prior). He also suggested that “we should apologise to Russia” and that Donald Trump could potentially de-escalate the war quickly.
Benny Johnson’s main talking points revolved around stopping Ukraine aid and emphasising the domestic problems caused by the Democrats in the US.
In the case of Lauren Southern, the Russian connection is more evident. In 2018, she visited Moscow to meet with Aleksandr Dugin, a political philosopher whose 1997 book ‘Foundations of Geopolitics’ is said to be a blueprint for the Russian aggression since the First Chechen War.
Most Tenet Media creators have attempted to distance themselves from the scheme, suggesting they had no knowledge of the origin of the funding.
Dave Rubin has claimed that him and the other commentators were “victims of this scheme”. Johnson also referred to himself and the other influencers as “victims”, and, as a strong advocate for freedom of speech, threatened to sue anyone who claims otherwise. Pool also released a statement saying that, “should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims”.
The indictment suggests a shift in the tactics of Russian misinformation operations. Instead of utilising bot and troll accounts with limited following, they’ve started supporting so-called social media ‘superspreader accounts’ with huge reach to target key audiences in foreign states.
The ‘superspreader’ term was introduced in a study related to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation which showed that 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and X is attributable to just twelve social media accounts. Several studies have suggested that this same trend can be detected in geopolitical content.
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The indictment emphasised that this is “one of RT’s covert projects in the United States”, so this funding scheme could be the tip of the iceberg.
In the Justice Department’s statement, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olse, said the Russian government has “long sought to sow discord and chaos in the United States through propaganda and foreign malign influence campaigns. As alleged, the covert operations by RT employees exploited our free and open press and targeted millions of Americans as unwitting victims of Russia’s psychological warfare.”