The US Department of Justice indictments in Russia’s wryly dubbed “Good Old USA” misinformation rollout gave us a sudden, shocking look inside the continually changing world of fake news and how it is successfully reshaping the global political narrative, including here in Australia.
It’s not so much the scale of the disinformation. Or even the reveal that (unwittingly, they protest) right-wing YouTubers were being paid to promote Russian talking points. It’s the success the campaign has had in polluting a mainstream political discourse with racism and divisive invective across the world.
The key documents released by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations include the long-expected reports of troll farms and bot marshalling in a worldwide “social media influencers network” that includes fake accounts across US states, France, Germany and other unnamed countries, and paid social media advertisements fed by a Moscow-based “text factory” and daily meme creation.
But the biggest shock has been the news that in a flashback to the 1930s, “Russian gold” (about US$10 million) was used to astro-turf America’s leading right-wing YouTube network, Tenet Media, a self-proclaimed “supergroup” of high-profile commentators like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern.
They were among a group of 2,800 social media influencers identified by Russia. They spanned 81 countries and included television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think tank analysts, veterans, professors and comedians. Russia was also monitoring another list of over 1,900 “anti-influencers” (assumed to be opposed to Russian interests) from 52 countries.
“We need influencers!” read a note to one of the meetings (according to an FBI footnote). “A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them.”
Most of the Tenet crew have denied knowing anything about the substantial Russian money they were getting — not foreign agents, apparently, simply, um, unobservant, rhyming Humbert Wolfe for the new century:
“You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”
According to Russian planning documents released by the FBI, the YouTube payments were a key part of a “Guerilla Media Campaign” to racialise economic and social discontent around eight talking points, such as “risk of job loss for white Americans”, “privileges for people of colour, perverts and disabled” and “threat of crime coming from people of colour and immigrants” (sounds like a daily news list for a few Australian media outlets).
Before Tenet Media shut down after the DOJ indictments (and before YouTube took all posts down from its platform) ,Wired magazine applied word counts in closed captioning on the Tenet videos to test whether the Russians were getting value for money.
They found “the influencers stress[ed] highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like ‘Trans Widows Are a Thing and It’s Getting OUT OF HAND’ and ‘Race Is Biological But Gender Isn’t???’ The word ‘trans’ appears 152 times, and ‘transgender’ 98.“
The personalities tagged as receiving Russian money would be familiar to Australia’s Sky News after dark audience.
Here’s Rubin early this year, for example, all chummy with Paul Murray in a semi-regular commentary about the US elections. And here’s Johnson with Piers Morgan puffing a “cool” Donald Trump. Southern had a stint as a Sky News contributor while living in Australia in early COVID times.
Little wonder media critics have been quick to point out that Murdoch family media personalities are at the centre of amplifying the talking points and catch phrases from the Russian-funded media, laundering them into everyday political conversation.
Indeed, the talking points would be recognisable to anyone with even the faintest awareness of Australia’s News Corp-dominated political discourse. After Fox reported on the list of Russian propaganda topics, Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall wrote: “Any viewer of Fox News opinion shows over the past few years will immediately recognise that the topics cited and neatly provided in on-screen graphic form are precisely the same ones featured in an everyday rundown on most Fox News shows.”
Sometimes, it seems, Fox and News Corp aren’t enough. As part of the campaign, Russia created fake “doppelganger” pages — just like the real thing only more so! Links to pages like Fox were posted on social media with headlines like: “Zelenskyy loses in war and diplomacy”.
We are past the more innocent days when fake news spread through Facebook’s micro-targeting, shifting votes with viral memes about Clinton emails. Now, we’re getting a well-funded and more sophisticated play that seeks to set political narratives in stone and fight culture wars at a global scale.
