Surprise! Russian propaganda outlets have been funneling lots of cash into some sympathetic YouTubers…amazing amounts of money. They had a fake figurehead named “Grigoriann” who recruited these commentators to churn out videos that expressed the views that Russia likes.
Prosecutors said one of the Tenet founders began soliciting two commentators for work on behalf of “Grigoriann” around February 2023. One of the personalities, described as “Commentator-1,” said he would need $5 million annually “for him to be interested” in creating videos for the fake persona, Grigoriann. The other, identified as “Commentator-2,” needed $100,000 per weekly episode “to make it worth his while,” according to the indictment.
The two commentators eventually entered into contracts, prosecutors said. The contract for Commentator-1 required four weekly videos that he would host and would be livestreamed by Tenet Media in exchange for $400,000 per month and a $100,000 signing bonus. Commentator-2 agreed to provide weekly videos for $100,000 apiece, the indictment states.
OK, I’ll make videos for a mere $10K per week. No problem. I could commit to making that my full-time job for only half a million per year, although I’d also willingly accept $5 million, like those bozos did.
Maybe the problem is that I don’t express views that are favorable to Moscow. Or have 1 or 2 million followers on YouTube.
The well-paid commentators have been identified as Tim Pool and either Dave Rubin or Benny Johnson (doesn’t matter which is which, they’re all kind of indistinguishable right-wing turds). If you don’t recognize those names, good for you — they are the schlockiest, dumbest, most dishonest people on YouTube.
There’s something wrong at the core of YouTube, because have you noticed that it’s always the worst people who float to the top of that medium?
“… because have you noticed that it’s always the worst people who float to the top of that medium?”
Nah. The worst people also seem to float to the top in big business.
Dave Rubin rings a bell and I know as much as anyone ever needs to anout Tim Pool. IIRC the type of internet people I follow call him Dim Tool.
The latest russian talking point they’re spewing in response is “but russia was trying to hurt trump with this! Putin wants Harris!”
Funny how the 10 million dollars all went to you pro-trump guys, though. Very strange.
Russia interfering in US elections again?
Good reason to send lots more arms to Ukraine, sez me.
This is way over the market rate for these sorts of videos.
The Russians aren’t very bright.
They could have bought 10 right wing YouTubers/X formerly Twitters so called Influencers for a lot less than that sort of money.
These guys whoever they are, aren’t worth that sort of money.
I suspect they could have just skipped the low level pawns and paid a little more and gotten…Donald Trump himself. During a special offer week, they would throw in the Heritage Foundation and someone in Trump’s inner circle as well.
I used to switch into incognito mode (so as not to sully my YouTube history) and watch the very occasional video from Alexander Mercouris, a former British lawyer who was disbarred for ripping off a client, and for lying to the police, before turning into a Putin propagandist Ukraine war commentator.
Vile stuff and completely shameless liar. If he isn’t being paid by Moscow, then he is even dumber and more contemptible than he looks.
Teasing Putin says Russia backs Kamala Harris, cites her ‘infectious’ laugh
1) They are right about not taking Putin at face value
2) Putin might prefer Trump not for any specific policy positions, but because Trump will cause chaos for his perceived enemy.
There is a lot more on this breaking story.
Here is one more article from Yahoo news.
.1. There are more than 3 Russian propagandists.
This article lists 6, none that I have ever heard of.
.2. They all claim that they are innocent victims and dupes of the Russians.
That may or may not be true.
While I never believe right wingers without good reasons, I have no way of knowing for sure that they are lying here. That is the prosecuting attorney’s problem, not mine.
.3. Who can’t claim that is their employer, Tenet media of Tennessee, USA. They at least had to know. They need to be arrested, deposed under oath, and go before a judge and jury.
.4. While millions of dollars sounds like a lot of money, it isn’t.
It is for ordinary people like most of us.
It is not for a nation state like Russia. They spend many times that every hour in Ukraine to kill civilians with aerial weapon systems.
.5. Strangely enough, the Russian government doesn’t actually need to pay right wing GOPers to parrot the Russian Party line.
They do it for free all the time anyway.
Surprise! He graduated from East Texas Baptist University.
$100K.
A week.
For making video shilling for genocidal fascist regimes.
Meanwhile I’m try to get by–and failing–to get by on $300 a week.
…
It doesn’t pay to be an honest citizen.
I guess I haven’t spent enough time there to notice that. But I have noticed that when I eat a lot of oats, my turds float.
@5.raven : “I suspect they could have just skipped the low level pawns and paid a little more and gotten…Donald Trump himself.”
I think they’ve already got Trump and had him for ages. Some dodgy Russian money save dhim from and notroious PP tape Kompromat apparently..
@8. raven “They all claim that they are innocent victims and dupes of the Russians.” Mandy Rice Davies Applies..(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3F )
@7. Reginald Selkirk : “Teasing Putin says Russia backs Kamala Harris, cites her ‘infectious’ laugh.”
If anyone actually believes that, well, I have a bridge to sell them..
The internet is a jerk.
drsteve @#2
https://youtu.be/uM_zrWT2_bQ?si=QqChuCv5fmoqyk2_
You’ll get the general idea in a few minutes if you can’t bear the deep dive. This manboy has built a very lucrative career reading the headline then guessing the contents, usually incorrectly. While I don’t believe any of the “we wuz duped” claims, in his case I’d be tempted.
Like the undead, the Russiagate conspiracy and its associated fabrications are back (just in time for election season!), with no need of any vital functions like evidence or credibility. We forgot to chop off its head last time.
One of the indicted guys, Simes was the CEO (selected by Nixon) for thirty years at the Center for the National Interest, which started out as the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom but was renamed after a legacy battle. Pretty classic that Nixon’s Center became a Russian front.
Well, WTH.
Look who else is involved.
Some kooky clown called Elon Musk.
As I pointed out earlier, the Russians don’t have to pay right wingnuts to promote their ideology.
They will do it for free.
Elon Musk was doing it and apparently wasn’t even being paid for it.
How much harm can this guy do to his adopted country before we take away his citizenship and put him on the next plane to Russia or South Africa?
Just in case one person in the world is left that doesn’t know it. I will never buy a Tesla car, SpaceX launch, or anything connected to…Elon Musk.
I wonder if our old pal Andy Schlafly has been in on the take in this. I drop in over at Conservapaglia every now and then and it’s nothing but pure Russian propaganda of late.
Tenet is solidly in the middle of the right wingnut swamp. Glenn Beck, Turning Point USA, And they knew exactly where that Russian money was coming from. They were working with RT.
RT is the acryonym for Russia Today, one of the main propaganda outlets for the Russian government.
I really hope these horrible people are dumb enough to flee their arrest and indictment and move to Russia. These days Russia is looking more and more like something Stalin would feel right at home in.
I’m a 50YO white liberal male atheist. If I get laid off, do you think that I could make money by pretending to convert to MAGA? That is if I abandoned everything I consider good?
@15. beholder :
First, this is a whole other new thing not that. Second – Conspiracy theory? Not really given it was actually something real and Trump was explictly NOT exonerated despite him lying otherwise.
Via the Mueller investigation wikipage :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_special_counsel_investigation#Conclusions
Bolding added.
We? Whose “we” tankie?
There is evidence and credible reasons to think Trump is Putin’s puppet – not least of which being things like Trump’s reactions & non-reactions to Putin. It is very clear Trump is at least on Putin’s side and admires Putin and his pathetic “strongman” homophobic, genocidal dictatorship. Which BTW is working out horrendously badly for Russia.
Anyhow, isn’t throwing people out of windows or poisoning them with polonium tea or novichok more your mobs style of murder rather than decapitation, oh Beheld accurately as Putin apologist here?
PS. Slava Ukraini!
While I’m happy that these professional dim-witted liars got caught, I’m surprised that what they did was illegal.
These idiots were nowhere near the top of YouTube; the best among them had 2.5 million subscribers. Simone Giertz has more subscribers. So do Practical Engineering (nerdy civil engineering explainers), LegalEagle (popularization of legal stuff), Coffeezilla (investigative reporting), The Spiffing Brit (finding exploits in strategy games), Natural Habitat Shorts (funny cartoons about weird facts for animals), KLR Productions (voiceovers on animal videos) who are all in the 3 to 4 million subs range. Also in that range, Physics Girl despite having been out with a debilitating case of long COVID for a couple years.
Getting a bit more mainstream: NileRed (chemistry videos) is well over 6 million, the Hydraulic Press Channel is at 9.5 million, same as the Steven Colbert show. The Slow Mo Guys are at 15 million, Jimmy Kimmel at 20 million.
Of course, none of those people are pulling in the cash per subscription as the screaming heads were. (Except I guess Colbert and Kimmel probably are, but they mostly are TV shows.)
(Subscription counts are just a proxy for how likely people are to get shown videos, but it’s the metric everyone uses because YouTube puts it out publicly.)
@F.O.: the dim-witted liars aren’t getting charged with anything. It’s their handlers who are. Of course, said handlers are mostly in Russia.
The majority report did a video on this. Apparently, there is a lot of funny material here. For example, the Russians created a fake linkedin profile for the Gregoriann guy and they listed the usual linkedin fluff, including a phrase that Gregoriann fights for “social justice”. This phrase ticked off Dave Rubin and he didn’t want to do it, probably thinking the guy is some fucking leftie woke or something.
Something wrong at Youtube? How so, its not like someone could, like happed to a guy I sometimes watch, named Suris, both, simultaneously, be recognized by Youtube as “owning the video clip of a Sony video game, in which a villain is revealed, such that he could literally demand that every other person to ever post about it share revenue with him – having been, decades ago, the first person to post about the subject on there, and thus the first person to have that video segment.”, and, had to spend all night disputing, one by one, since there is no method to mark all videos with the same accusation as invalid and BS, and if you don’t, the ones you don’t will be taken, after a few days of non-response as, “Gosh, I guess the accusation is automatically true”, because some Chinese scam company, claiming to own the copyright on a music, made by someone else, who made it public domain, with attribution, flagged nearly every single video he ever posted in the last 10 years as “violating our copyright”.
How dare you suggest “anything” is broken in Youtube? Its more like, “Almost everything.”
Like the undead, beholder is back, just in time to parrot* the lies of Trump and Putin. And beholder, don’t insult the great majority of commenters here by implying that they share your ludicrous and rebarbative views.
*With apologies to all members of the Psittaciformes.
There is some gold among the dreck. For instance the top chess streamers are all well over a million subs. This won’t matter to you unless you are, like me, a chess player. By Zeuss I wish I had this resource back in the days of yore when Bobby Fischer was king. I live in a region with few masters and no grandmasters, but I can get lessons from world class players on the youtube. I am also mostly housebound, or at least house adjacent, but if I get the yen to play some games I can do it with people all over the world by logging on the the popular chess servers. Chess.com has millions and millions of people who regularly play on it. I do prefer Lichess which has merely hundreds of thousands.
At 80 I’m not going to get much better at chess, but it’s at my fingertips if I need it. And from time to time I do indeed need it. Real chessplayers will understand that.
MAGA Desperately Claims Russian Propagandists Were the Real “Victims”
The term useful idiot hasn’t been mentioned on this page yet.
YouTube Deletes Tim Pool’s Embarrassing Kremlin-Backed Videos
StevoR@21:
More fool them. It is well documented that on June 9, 2016 members of Trump’s campaign met with a Russian operative in one of Trump’s hotel properties:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting
This was widely understood at the time to be a coded reference to the Magnitsky sanctions the US had levied against Russia.
So, the quid pro quo here, reading between the lines, was: Trump gets opposition research, in exchange for a promise that if elected he will repeal the Magnitsky sanctions.
And then:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-find-clintons-emails-on-or-around-the-same-day-russians-targeted-her-accounts
Trump asked Russia — publicly — to find Clinton’s emails. Russia did, and leaked them via Wikileaks.
And then, on February 2, 2017 — after he had been in office a mere two weeks — we have CBS reporting:
Thankfully, Congress and the courts slapped him down and restored the sanctions, but we have a conspiracy and then acts in furtherance here. Trump committed treason and Russia committed election interference. I’ve no idea why Mueller soft-pedalled this to such an extreme. It wasn’t even as well disguised as Nixon’s shenanigans, ferchrissake.