How the Russian Government used U.S influencers to sway the 2024 election

University of Michigan School of Information PhD candidate Laura Kurek was featured on Influenced: The Tenet Media Plot, a six-part Audible series. The series explores how Tenet Media, a shell company funded by the Russian government, hired established U.S podcasters to produce content on divisive political issues ahead of the 2024 U.S election. 

Kurek, who studies online influence operations and political communication, spoke with investigative journalist Nicky Woolf about her research collecting all 560 videos Tenet Media posted on Rumble. YouTube removed the videos after the Department of Justice indictment exposing the Russian funding behind the company.

Her research resulted in a dataset paper, “Outsourcing an Information Operation: A Complete Dataset of Tenet Media’s Podcasts on Rumble,” and a publicly available dataset on Zenodo. The paper was coauthored by UMSI researchers Kevin Zheng, Eric Gilbert and Ceren Budak. 

In the series, Kurek discusses the clickbait, culture-war content Tenet Media posted, including videos focused on immigration, gender identity and U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine. She also explains how the case reflects a shift in influence operations: rather than creating fake accounts, Russia allegedly outsourced messaging to existing U.S. content creators.

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Listen to Influenced: The Tenet Media Plot on Audible. 

Learn more about Laura Kurek’s research and time at UMSI by visiting her profile.