Alleged Russian Disinformation on US Soil Includes Divisive Climate Content

Welcome back to the climate disinformation Data Monitor. At the beginning of September, an indictment from the United States Department of Justice threw US-based Tenet Media into the spotlight. The indictment alleged that nearly $10 million was sent to “US Company 1” from Russian state employees working on behalf of Russia Today (RT). Minor digging revealed “US Company 1” to be Tenet Media, with the $9.7 million allegedly sent from Russia representing nearly 90% of the company’s revenue since its founding less than a year ago. 

We looked at the online channels of Tenet, its two founders and six paid commentators. We found climate content representing 23.5 million views and 1 million individual engagements. The thing is, this climate content, allegedly backed by Russia Today, is indistinguishable from the climate misinformation we usually see from other far-right and fossil-fuel backed channels. Read on for more. 

TACTICS AND CONTENT ALLEGEDLY BACKED BY RT EMPLOYEES

Content on climate change from allegedly Russia-funded Tenet Media and its network covers everything from climate denial, to slur-laced attacks on climate activism, to conspiracy theories, to pro fossil-fuel commentary on climate-related policy, as shown in the table below. While climate content was a minority of content across the channels analysed, the topic still represented a useful “issue stack”, strengthening channels’ overall brand and talking points.

Table 1: Climate content across the channels of Tenet Media, its two founders and six “commentators” between 1 September 2023 and 23 September 2024. See the full briefing note here.

CAAD and its members have tracked all of these narratives for years now in our reports on disinformation. It’s a testament to how disruptive, divisive and destabilising this content is that Russia Today employees are allegedly requesting or at least endorsing its spread in the United States. 

Then we come to the tactics. Exhibit 9A of the Department of Justice indictment exposes RT employees’ self-styled “Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States”. 

The approaches described in this document remind us all too well of climate misinformation tactics, including:

• The meme-ification of misinformation;

• Using coordinated inauthentic behaviour like comment farms;

• Minimising outright falsehoods by maximising paltering; and

• Repeating over and over that the mainstream media and elites are hiding the truth from you. 

The overall approach is summed up nicely in this direct quote from Exhibit 9A,

“There is no point in justifying Russia [but people are] afraid of losing the American dream [which] should be exploited in the course of an information campaign”. 

Essentially, the game plan is to exploit legitimate fears and grievances of the US population for ulterior motives. Here’s a thought exercise - if we replace “Russia” in the above sentence with “environmental destruction”, doesn’t it look all too familiar?

 “IT JUST FEELS LIKE OVERT SHILLING”

That’s a direct quote from a staff member of Tenet Media, according to the unsealed indictment, about a piece of content that RT employees were asking the organisation to post to its channels. The content in question was posted before RT’s employees were given full access to Tenet’s channels.

As covered in CAAD’s most recent Data Monitor, the outrage economy pays in many ways - apparently through foreign influence manipulation money too. Three of the six disinfluencers’ production companies were allegedly paid $8.7 million in the past year by Tenet Media, with at least two of them requesting $100,000 per weekly episode.

WHAT NOW?

While an FBI investigation on this continues, the contents of this indictment demonstrate how climate disinformation can be used as a weapon of foreign interference; and how spreading these tactics and narratives - indistinguishable from fossil-fuelled disinformation - is worth paying millions upon millions for per annum.

Key to RT’s strategy in the US are the existing disinfluencer networks. According to the indictment, disinfluencers ended up receiving the vast majority of the Russian money; but they are able to deny any knowledge of Russian involvement. Their ability to profit in this way is directly supported by social media platforms’ algorithms and feed curation. It’s notable that Tenet Media and its associated channels continue to run on many social media platforms without notable intervention.

IN OTHER NEWS

The Hague becomes the first place to legally ban fossil fuel advertising. The ban will take effect starting next year and applies to fossil fuel products and other high-carbon services like aviation and cruises. This follows a call from UN Chief Antonio Guterres earlier this year to ban fossil fuel ads. It is the first time such a ban is legally binding, following recent local motions passed in Edinburgh and Amsterdam. You can track a list of campaigns against fossil fuel adverts at World Without Fossil Ads.

PR and advertising agencies held over 1,000 contracts with fossil fuel companies between 2023 and 2024, according to new data from Clean Creatives. The F-List 2024 database identified 551 previously unknown contracts. WPP tops the list, with 79 contracts via its subsidiaries, including a campaign to “squash all the negative PR” for the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline project in Uganda.

Climate doubt, conspiracy theories and attacks on policies and protesters. A new CAAD analysis of over 30,000 posts in the UK exposes the narratives and tactics used in the past year to spread climate misinformation on X, Facebook and Telegram. In some cases, accounts based outside of the UK are commenting on UK-related climate content in order to gain clout and monetize through revenue sharing and merchandising.

Google drags its feet on enforcing its own demonetisation policies. After announcing in 2021 its intention to demonetise climate denial, Google took nearly three years to do so in the case of the Heartland Institute. The Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters have identified many more monetized deniers, but Google continues to stall. You can ask Google to take action here.

“The fossil fuel industry deliberately uses university partnerships to further its own interests” according to a new study in WIREs Climate Change. Fossil fuel influence at universities has taken place for decades, says Floodlight News, but their undue influence is chronically understudied. Researchers sifted through 14,000 academic papers measuring outside influence on universities, finding just seven papers mentioning the fossil fuel industry.

If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, want to find out more about our research and intel, or interview one of our members, please email contact@caad.info.

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