Tenet Media and the limited reach and impact of Russian disinformation

Russian incompetence, useless idiots, anti-establishment politics, and the perennial panic about foreign propaganda

The Department of Justice recently indicted two Russian nationals for funding and influencing Tenet Media, an American company founded by Laura Chen and her husband in 2022. The company described itself as a “network of heterodox commentators," including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern.

According to the indictment, employees of Russian state-controlled company RT funnelled around 10 million dollars into the company to influence its coverage in ways favourable to Russian interests. The influencers have depicted themselves as unwitting “victims” of this operation who maintained “full editorial control” over their output.

Following the indictment, YouTube banned Tenet Media’s channel.

For many, this episode provides further evidence of Russian disinformation’s significant threat to American democracy. At least since 2016, many pundits, politicians, and researchers have aggressively highlighted this threat, including in the influential narrative that such disinformation swung the 2016 US presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.

At that time, the focus was primarily on the Internet Research Agency, a Russian-based troll factory that published content from accounts imitating American citizens and news agencies. Most of this content was pro-Trump, reflecting Russia’s assumed geopolitical goal of placing him in the White House.

The funding of Tenet Media seems to involve an alarming escalation in the sophistication and impact of such online propaganda efforts.

However, this appearance is misleading. As with Russia’s previous disinformation efforts, this episode highlights its incompetence, not its power. And it is much more revealing of pathologies within American politics than of informational threats posed by forces outside of it.

The 2016 Russian disinformation panic

First, there is no compelling evidence that Russia’s online disinformation efforts swung the 2016 election in Trump’s favour.

Research shows that exposure to such content represented a tiny part of most people’s information diets and overwhelmingly preached to the choir. That is, among the small minority of social media users who engaged with it, they were mostly already strong Trump supporters. For example, on Twitter, just 1% of users were responsible for 70% of exposures, 10% were responsible for 98%, and those users were largely Republican voters.

In other words, such content reflected rather than shaped its audience’s political attitudes.

Given this, researchers “find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

This finding aligns with other research and reflects a widespread pattern in online disinformation: such content is relatively rare and primarily caters to audience demand among a small minority of active social media users. This “misinformation minority” is not composed of undecided voters; it is made up of people with strong, pre-existing attitudes, identities, and worldviews who seek out “pro-attitudinal” information (i.e., content that coheres with what they already believe).

This pattern should not be surprising. People’s attitudes and behaviours (e.g., voting intentions) are very difficult to influence, and most attempts at shaping public opinion fail. Even very well-funded, well-targeted, and well-researched influence operations in politics and advertising typically have minimal effects.

Of course, this does not mean propaganda is never successful. Not only are the effects of influence campaigns challenging to estimate with certainty, but such content can have indirect negative consequences even without persuading many people. For example, it might reinforce and amplify pre-existing attitudes and polarisation.

Nevertheless, evidence concerning Russian online disinformation efforts during the 2016 US presidential election suggests their impact was minimal, which aligns with research into online disinformation and propaganda more generally.

Is the case of Tenet Media likely to be an exception to this pattern?

Consider the influential commentator Richard Hanania, who writes,

“A lot of people thought Russian disinformation was exaggerated as a force in our politics. Other investigations and indictments could be brushed off. Not this case. You have a network of right-wing influencers everyone has heard of, some with millions of followers, directly paid by Putin’s government to repeat his line on Ukraine. Hopefully this creates unity around the idea that Russian disinformation threatens American democracy.”

This interpretation is misleading.

Reasons for scepticism

First, this episode seems to replicate the pattern we observe with online disinformation elsewhere.

To begin with, only somebody who is extremely online could think that “everyone has heard of” the culture warriors that make up Tenet Media’s network of influencers. I would bet that the overwhelming majority of Americans, most of whom pay very little attention to politics, have never heard of them.

Moreover, most of those who have heard of them likely ignore them. Pundits like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool are not exactly master manipulators. To people who do not share their worldview, they come across as—and there is no polite way to put this—highly biased, partisan, and dumb.

Given this, Tenet Media’s audience was not a cross-section of the American public. It was overwhelmingly composed of extremely online, right-wing culture warriors seeking content that affirms and rationalises their pre-existing worldview.

Finally, even if such pundits persuade some people, this does not establish the efficacy of Russian influence.

Due to the American right’s hard pivot to conspiratorial, anti-establishment politics in recent years, there is already significant overlap between its talking points on various issues and the content of Russian propaganda.

Therefore, Tenet Media’s pundits’ claim that they maintained “full editorial control” over their output is plausible: even in the absence of funding by Russian propagandists, the kind of facile, oppositional, anti-establishment politics they espouse—if the “establishment” is for it (experts, vaccines, Ukraine, etc.), they are against it—is already in line with much Russian propaganda.

This harmony between the talking points of America's internal, anti-establishment politics and its foreign adversaries is not new.

Osama bin Laden had Noam Chomsky’s books on his bookshelf. This is not because Chomsky was funded by Islamic terrorists any more than the Khmer Rouge had to pay him to cast doubt on the mass genocide they inflicted on the Cambodian people. It is simply because radical, left-wing intellectuals like Chomsky embrace a simple “everything bad in the world is due to America” theory of geopolitics that often mirrors the views of America’s rivals and enemies on the global stage.

Similarly, America’s modern online, right-wing culture warriors embrace a child-like rejection of anything associated with the “liberal establishment”. Although this rejection often aligns with the talking points preferred by Putin and many other hostile, authoritarian governments around the world, such governments are not the cause of this political stance.

The data

Of course, these are admittedly just my opinions and impressions. Nevertheless, in an excellent recent article, Jennifer Allen reports empirical research that supports this dismissive view.

First, Allen observes that Tenet Media’s YouTube channel published videos totalling 11 million views on YouTube. This is a tiny number relative to the scale of the informational ecosystem. To put it into perspective, during the same period, Tucker Carlson’s channel had 400 million views, and Fox News had 2.2 billion.

Second, Allen observes that pro-Russian talking points did not even feature particularly heavily in Tenet Media's videos. Whereas they only mentioned Russia in 8.1% of their videos, Fox News mentioned Russia in 18.9%, and Carlson mentioned Russia in 23.5%. Moreover, Carlson’s content was much more pro-Russian than Tenet Media’s during this period.

Finally, Allen notes that Tenet Media’s rhetoric was not more polarising than the content of either Fox News or Tucker Carlson.

In other words, Tenet Media produced content with much less reach than sources like Tucker Carlson and Fox News, which are—as far as we know—not funded by Russian sources. And relative to these other sources, its content was not particularly pro-Russian or polarising.

Combined with the assumption that Tenet Media’s content overwhelmingly preached to the choir anyway, this suggests that the influence of Russian propaganda in this case was negligible. With or without Russian influence, a thriving domestic informational ecosystem was already delivering content that aligned with Putin’s preferences.

Backfire

In fact, Russia’s efforts in this case have plausibly been worse than useless.

In recent years, many have alleged that right-wing culture warriors in the USA are funded by Russians. By revealing that this allegation is actually true in some high-profile cases, the whole episode has merely discredited pundits who were already churning out Putin apologetics for free. Moreover, it will probably cause at least some pundits to distance themselves a bit more from the most absurd pro-Russian content to avoid suspicion that they are shills themselves.

None of this should be surprising. Persuasion is hard at the best of times. The covert, mass manipulation of public opinion—in another country, no less—is extremely hard. And there is no reason to think a corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian state like Russia, where power is allocated based on political loyalty rather than merit, is well-positioned to overcome those challenges.

If there is something to be worried about in this area, it is that excessive attention to incompetent foreign propaganda distracts people from the many internal problems that plague America’s politics and public discourse.