The Death of Tenet Media and the Re-Birth of the Influencer
Earlier this month one of the biggest media scandals of the year (at least if you spend a lot of time online) broke out, and it’s sending shockwaves through the conservative media sphere. It’s also exposing the latest online influence techniques of nefarious governments and propagandists.
On Sept. 4th, 2024, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment accusing two Russian propagandists of bankrolling Tenet Media. Tenet Media was one of the most influential online media companies of the last few years, bankrolling several major conservative influencers like Lauren Southern and Tim Poole.
The implication currently roiling through X and Reddit is that the media figures that Tenet Media employed or collaborated with, like Southern and Poole, had their content influenced by Russian government. It’s a devastating, perhaps career ending accusation.
We don’t know the full truth yet of those accusations just yet. But if they are, they will be high profile examples of a hitherto lesser known technique of contemporary propagandists.
Automated Bots are So 2019
The first thing to note about modern online influence operations is that their use of fully automated “bots” has declined considerably from years past. Even as recently as the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the threat of automated accounts spouting off Russian talking points and brute forcing trending algorithms was thought to be everywhere.
But with attention came scrutiny. Over the last few years, social media platforms, not to mention the real users, have become much more adept at spotting automated accounts. Researchers and journalists have also developed powerful tools to detect the most obvious campaigns. When they aren’t being caught by filters, inorganic bots do a poor job changing hearts and minds on their own.
The new technique for influence campaigns, explained Samuel Woolley in his 2022 research study “Digital Propaganda: The Power of Influencers” is to make use of “semi-organic” bots. In other words, real people.
Whereas an automated bot profile is anonymous, lacks the social proof of an organic following and will crumble under the lightest Turing Test, a small time influencer — even one with only a few thousand followers or less — carries none of those weaknesses.
“Small time” is a key distinction here. Regular influencer marketing is a well known practice, in which the influencer boosting the talking point or product has a large following, a verifiable identity and a (ostensible) duty to disclose their financial arrangements. Those accounts are big, their behavior is family friendly and their content is highly curated. They can draw in a lot of eyeballs, but have little trust. They lack the relatability, edginess and intimacy that smaller, more localized accounts have.
Woolley recounts interviewing employees at social-media marketing firms who coordinated and rented out small accounts to promote various information — or disinformation — campaigns. The firms were particularly fond of leveraging ‘nano-influencers,’ which were accounts with less than 10,000 followers. They were paid tiny sums — if anything at all — in light of their small following, but if coordinated correctly their influence could be immense.
One person Woolley interviewed characterized these tiny accounts as “today’s grassroots community organizers” and “trusted messengers,” eliciting trust and ‘genuine engagement.’ Their usage, buffeted by automated bots, gave the “illusion of authenticity.”
While purely automated bots undoubtedly still play a role in amplifying these accounts when needed, the real genius of their usage is that their engagement typically is organic. They’re followers view them as trusted arbiters, and boost their engagement themselves.
One person Woolley met, who owned several meme sites, used Telegram to coordinate a few thousand propagandist employees. When a client wanted a particular image meme or message spread, he’d send it to all of them, where they disseminated it across small accounts and even private group chats.
Finally, because paying political influencers typically occurs outside of the social media platform they’re using, it’s more difficult to track and enforce rules surrounding sponsored posts. Campaign finance laws and other disclosures can be skirted or ignored. Even if they are caught, the accounts are so small that a ban or suspension does little damage to the overall campaign.
You’ve probably seen it already
So who’s doing this? The Canadian government, for one. While we don’t know exactly how often this has happened, publicly available contracts and records from the House of Commons report that since 2021, the federal government has spent at least $1.7 million on small scale influencer marketing campaigns.
Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada have all done it. They’ve used TikTok, Youtube, Instagram and Facebook, tapping into small Canadian influencers to bolster their messages on COVID-19, cannabis usage and food safety.
Many of these influencers are paid in access, not money, which makes tracking their usage more challenging. Did that small time Youtuber just “happen” to come across the Deputy Prime Minister recently?
The most notable example came in April of this year, when Chrystia Freeland invited several unpaid influencers to the launch of the 2024 federal budget. This included granting them access to the lockup period before the budget was officially announced.
In 2019 this was tried less successfully, when Elections Canada wanted to use influencers in an ensemble video to spread information for the 2019 election. The initiative was canceled after poor vetting, but was slated to cost over $500,000.
The Americans are doing it bigger
This practice is also very common in the United States. Only there, the practice, while more widespread, isn’t talked about as openly. Most influencers, if asked explicitly, will admit to being supported by media companies or even Super Pacs. These connections aren’t kept secret, they’re simply rarely acknowledged.
The connection between the influencers themselves and the government entities or political parties paying them is rarely broadcast, and typically done with a few degrees of separation. Tenet Media is one example from the right-of-centre, but there are other companies and influencers employing the same tactics.
One example is Harry Sisson, a firebrand pro-Democratic influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and TikTok. He’s employed by Palette Management, a marketing firm. And Palette is in turn paid by, among other entities, the Democratic Party, which has paid it over $200,000 USD since 2022. Harry himself, meanwhile, has been paid nearly $20,000 USD since 2022 by other Super Pacs.
In 2023 the Biden campaign pushed hard with this strategy, connecting with hundreds of small-time influencers and inviting them to the White House. They even went so far as to create a specialized briefing space — as if they were regular reporters — right in the White House.
So the next time you see your favourite niche influencer start getting political, be skeptical of their motives. Their behaviour might be genuine. Or not. Or most likely, somewhere in between.
