Inside the Russian Political Influence Campaign in Canada

When far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern was summoned to tell MPs about her part in an alleged Russian disinformation operation last month, she told them it was no big deal.

“If you were worried about this alleged Russian money unduly influencing Canadian issues — good news, didn't happen,” she told the standing committee on public safety and national security, which includes Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Bloc Québécois MPs.

The Russians’ efforts to use Tenet Media as a secret propaganda tool were a failure, Southern told MPs. Few people watched the videos, she said, expert assessments of the project's impact were inflated and the committee’s investigation was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

But researchers who reviewed Tenet Media and their related activities have a very different assessment of their impact on Canadian politics.

Southern’s testimony on Nov. 21 was part of the committee’s larger investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence politics in Canada. The hearings started in September in response to a U.S. indictment that alleged two employees of Russia Today, a Russian state media channel that aims to reach western audiences, had funnelled $10 million to a media channel called Tenet Media. Tenet featured YouTube, TikTok and other social media content made by six high-profile right-wing commentators.

Southern was one of the six commentators. And at least one of the founders of the channel, Lauren Chen, is Canadian. Southern and the other contributors say they were unaware of the Russian government’s alleged involvement.

Despite Southern’s claims, experts say the investigations into Tenet Media provide an important look at how the information many Canadians consume on YouTube and other platforms is being shaped, funded and promoted by foreign governments and domestic special interests.

Especially with a federal election coming next year.

“I expect the next Canadian election to have an enormous amount of influence from outside the country,” said Aengus Bridgman, the director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory. “And we're not really ready for it as a country.”

While the Tenet Media story shows that Russia is active in shaping media narratives in Canada, Bridgman said that much of the foreign influence on Canada’s online political discourse comes from the United States, although that influence is not state-sanctioned.

“It’s really troubling that so many Canadians get their information from these folks and from others like them,” Bridgman said, referring to online influencers who stoke political division. “That's their choice. But one of the things spending a lot of time in an online ecosystem does is it shifts your perceptions of the world that you live in.”

2,000 videos, 16 million views

Lawmakers in the United States have been concerned about Russian meddling in elections since efforts to hack databases and push misinformation came to light following the 2016 presidential election.

Marcus Kolga, the founder and director of DisinfoWatch, said Russia’s information operations have two aims: they want to undermine support for Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion and destabilize western democracies by focusing on polarizing and divisive narratives.

“When we look at these operations, we shouldn't just be looking for those narratives that advance Russian interests,” Kolga said, “but those that are polarizing and could contribute to the undermining of our democracy.”

Tenet co-founder Lauren Chen is a right-wing YouTuber from Quebec who published several opinion pieces on Russia Today in the last several years.

A U.S. Department of Justice indictment alleges that Chen was being paid by RT’s parent company not only for her articles for Tenet Media, but also for some of the videos she made for other social media accounts from March 2021 to February 2022.

On Feb. 16, 2022, eight days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Chen wrote an article for RT titled “If You’re American and Oppose War with Russia, Expect to Be Smeared as Unpatriotic.” Her other contributions often focused on culture war topics like race and gender.

Chen previously published her work under the handle Roaming Millennial; she’s perhaps best known for interviewing white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2017.

The indictment does not name Chen or her husband, Liam Donovan, instead referring to “Founder 1” and “Founder 2.”

The Tyee and other news media have identified Chen as “Founder 1” and Donovan as “Founder 2” based on matching phrases in the indictment and Tenet Media’s website; Donovan and Chen’s social media accounts; and company records.

The indictment charges two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with money laundering and conspiracy to violate the United States’ Foreign Agents Registration Act. According to the indictment, Founder 1 and Founder 2 have not been charged with any criminal offences. Chen refused to answer any questions when she was called to testify to the parliamentary committee because of potential legal consequences.

In early 2023, Chen began scouting for potential contributors for a new media company. According to evidence presented in the indictment, Chen and Donovan were aware the money for the company came from employees of RT and frequently called their associates “the Russians” in messages. Chen told some of the contributors the company was financed by a fictional investor named Eduard Grigoriann, according to the indictment.

When Tenet Media launched in fall 2023, Chen and Donovan had signed up several right-wing influencers with significant social media followings: Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Taylor Hansen, Matt Christiansen and Lauren Southern. Except for Southern, all the Tenet contributors were American.

The indictment says Tenet Media produced 2,000 videos with a total of 16 million views.

Pro-Russia, but also anti-Canada

Following the release of the indictment, the Canadian Digital Media Research Network analyzed the content produced by the Tenet Media contributors, both for Tenet Media and for other social media channels. (Politics influencers often release their content both as a YouTube video and as a podcast episode.)

Bridgman and his colleague Jean-Romain Roy analyzed over 4,000 podcast and video episodes from Tenet Media’s Rumble channel and from Pool’s, Rubin’s and Johnson’s other channels, including content produced before Tenet Media was formed.

The researchers found that the influencers “frequently discussed Russia and were among the most frequent sharers of pro-Russian narratives over the past four years.”

Bridgman and Roy compared that content with a selection of other right-wing podcasts from figures like Glenn Beck, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh. The researchers found that the Tenet Media group discussed topics related to Russia far more frequently than the non-Tenet commentators.

“Whoever the analyst was in the Kremlin who identified these six influencers, they did a good job,” said Bridgman. “They identified voices that were both very good at spreading divisive content to the West and undermining institutions. And also, incidentally, they’re among the most extreme pro-Russian voices in the online discourse.”

Southern had travelled to Russia in 2018 and interviewed Alexander Dugin, a far-right figure considered to be an influence on Vladimir Putin. Southern told the parliamentary committee she was also offered a trip to the contested Donbas region in 2018, with full access to the Russian military. She said she turned that trip down, and later deleted several other interviews because she became suspicious that a key Russian contact was trying to influence her content.

On Feb. 25, 2022, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, she published a video called “What Does Russia Want?” according to the Internet Movie Database. The video is no longer available on Southern’s YouTube channel. Southern also told the committee she’d been a past contributor to Russia Today.

The Canadian Digital Media Research Network’s analysis also found that Canada is frequently used as a punching bag in the content Southern produces for Tenet Media, brought up as an example of how liberal policies can go wrong.

Canadian topics included linking immigration to violent crime, worries that assisted dying laws are being used to promote eugenics, and anger over the RCMP’s role in ending the convoy protests that shut down Ottawa in 2022.

“While Canada may not be the explicit target of the Tenet Media influencer operation, the influencers frequently invoke Canada on their podcasts to discuss topics and sentiments aligned with Russian operatives’ interest,” the authors of the analysis wrote. “Discussions that invoke Canada... almost always characterize Canada and Canadian institutions, politicians and policies in a negative light.”

Bridgman said the way Canada is talked about in these influencers’ podcasts and videos is different from how the country is normally discussed by American news media.

“There is a general principle of respect for another country's democratic discourse, and that has been the norm,” Bridgman said. “You wouldn't say, ‘This person should be elected.’”

In contrast, the “norm” for the American Tenet Media contributors is “‘Trudeau needs to go,’ and they will be campaigning for it during the next election,” Bridgman said.

Kolga said that dwelling on the perils of liberal policies also aligns with Russia’s objectives under President Vladimir Putin. Under Putin’s over 20-year-long rule, Russia has become more authoritarian and militaristic, has brutally crushed political dissent and has criminalized LGBTQ+ people.

Kolga pointed to a recent FBI affidavit that included documents intercepted from Russian government agencies.

The U.S. Department of Justice released the affidavit on Sept. 4, announcing it had shut down 32 internet domains “used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.”

The FBI affidavit includes a document from one of those Russian government organizations, the Social Design Agency, describing the campaign.

According to the document, the campaign topics included fears about poverty and inflation; risk of job loss for white Americans; threats of crime from people of colour and immigrants; overspending on foreign policy; and “privileges for people of color, perverts and disabled.”

“These influencers that were used to convey some of these narratives are known to inject extremely polarizing narratives into our information space,” Kolga noted. “This very closely aligns with those Russian objectives.”

How Lauren Southern fits in

Southern grew up in Surrey and Langley, B.C., and started making provocative YouTube videos criticizing topics like feminism, immigration and Islam in 2015. Her content has frequently advanced far-right narratives about immigration, race and social issues.

“I think that there are a lot of people that have concerns about the impacts of mass immigration removing the culture in certain areas,” she told the parliamentary committee.

“I think you could ask people in Brampton or Surrey what they think about the language being spoken around them, whether it's a Canadian language whatsoever, whether they feel that the culture is being preserved.”

By 2017, she had become an international far-right social media star and was featured in the documentary White Noise: Inside the Racist Right. The film profiled Southern alongside Richard Spencer, an American white supremacist, and Mike Cernovich, an anti-feminist blogger who became a prominent figure in the far-right movement in the United States.

From 2017 to 2019, Southern was travelling the world to carry out and film anti-Islam and anti-immigration stunts. She also filmed two documentaries: Farmlands and Borderless. Farmlands focuses on the murders of white farmers in South Africa, an issue that has been a focus of the far right amid fears of a “race war” and “white culture” being under threat. Borderless questions whether migrants seeking asylum in Europe are really fleeing from war-torn countries because their lives are in danger.

Southern has spoken many times about facing scrutiny from various governments because of her work. In a March video, she said she’d been frequently interrogated while travelling because of her association with Martin Sellner, a far-right Austrian activist. Sellner has proposed deporting “‘millions’ of foreigners and Germans of foreign origin deemed undesirable to a ‘model state’ in North Africa,” according to the French newspaper Le Monde.

For Tenet Media, Southern made videos about Muslim men committing crimes; fears that Irish people could be “replaced” by immigrants; food prices going up; and the Canadian government wasting money by funding investigations of unmarked graves at residential schools. She told the committee that her videos about Canadian topics performed poorly.

Kolga said it’s significant that Southern travelled to Russia to interview Dugin in 2018. (Southern made the trip with Brittany Pettibone, an American right-wing influencer who disseminated the Pizzagate conspiracy and is now married to Sellner.)

“I think it would be accurate to identify [Dugin] as a far-right Russian fascist,” Kolga said.

“He has advanced these ideas of a Eurasian world run from Moscow. He has promoted this view that Russia should be reconstituting the Soviet Union, and invading and occupying Europe all the way to Dublin. Dugin's Eurasian world extends literally from Dublin to Tokyo.”

Southern told the parliamentary committee that she did not agree with Dugin’s comments about killing Ukrainians or his antisemitic comments. She also pointed out that Dugin had been interviewed by TVO host Steve Paikin in 2015.

Bridgman said Southern’s efforts to downplay Tenet Media’s success should be questioned. He pointed out that she used $175,000 of the total $275,000 she was paid for her Tenet Media work to hire researchers, a videographer and an assistant, and to pay for studio space and travel, with the remaining $100,000 going to her own salary. Southern told the committee that signing with Tenet made it easier to make higher-quality videos more frequently.

Bridgman said it doesn’t really matter how successful Tenet Media was — the money injected into the influencers’ content-making apparatus has enabled them to make more videos, hire more staff and extend their reach, which goes beyond their work for Tenet. Some of the influencers made much more than Southern: Pool was paid $100,000 per video, according to the indictment and media reporting, while Tenet Media messages included in the indictment talk about paying Rubin between $2 million and $5 million to sign a contract.

“We as a country are now dealing with a group of people who we think of as individual influencers, but in practice operate like media organizations,” Bridgman said. “When they get additional resources, they hire more staff and they produce more content.”

A visit from CSIS

In response to questions from Liberal MP Salma Zahid, Southern said she had been recently visited by officers from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. She said they had “been putting immense psychological pressure on me to become an informant on this subject and other subjects.” Southern said the officers had visited and called her multiple times, including showing up at her home.

Southern said she declined to work with CSIS “because I'm not looking to become an asset for foreign governments, nor this government.”

Kolga said he also testified to the parliamentary committee, where he asked whether the RCMP was considering charges related to Tenet Media.

He said Canada placed Russia Today on an economic sanctions list in 2022, making it illegal for any Canadians to provide services to RT or to any other Russian state media. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Canada has supported Ukraine militarily and the government has continued to add more Russian companies and individuals to its sanctions list.

“The indictment clearly indicates that RT paid the two Canadian founders of Tenet Media,” he said. “It seems like a pretty clear and potentially blatant violation of our sanctions.”