In hundreds of videos since deleted by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and directed by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis. The content of these videos was described by prosecutors as “consistent” with Russia’s aims to sow political discord in the US. Among the areas covered: free speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, “racism against white people,” and Elon Musk.
To determine what specifically the Russian government is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 longform videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you can access the file here—and used natural language processing to identify common themes. We analyzed the data looking for the most frequently occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in each video, excluding words like “um” that don’t carry much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)
The project uses data stored in the following file:
- YouTube Video Data (./data/youtube_video_data.csv)
This CSV file contains information about YouTube videos and transcripts of Tenent Media videos.
email: dhruv_mehrotra@wired.com || signal: @dmehro.89