On with Kara Swisher - Useful Idiots? How Right-Wing Influencers Got $ to Spread Russian Propaganda

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Last week, the Department of Justice announced major indictments alleging that, among other things, the Kremlin was paying right-wing influencers, like Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson, to spread Russian propaganda. The payments were funneled through a Tennessee-based company called Tenet Media, and while Rubin, Pool, and Johnson deny knowledge of the plot ... they don’t seem to have asked too many questions about the mysterious benefactor who was supposedly funding Tenet and paying them unseemly large amounts of money. Unfortunately, this is only the latest in a string of foreign influence campaigns coming from Russia, China and Iran that target American elections. To break down all the news, Kara is joined by Julia Davis, Alex Stamos, and Brandy Zadrozny. Julia is a columnist for the Daily Beast, an investigative reporter, and the creator of the Russian Media Monitor; Alex is the chief information security officer at SentinelOne, the founder of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and a former chief security officer at Facebook; and Brandy is senior reporter at NBC News who covers the Internet, especially politics, tech, and extremism.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In one case, Russian employees of RT funneled almost $10 million to Tenet, a Tennessee-based media company founded by right-wing YouTubers. They used that money to hire well-known right-wing creators like Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin to create videos that would help elect Donald Trump and push the Kremlin's agenda on Ukraine. The Russians simultaneously worked on an influence campaign known as Doppelganger, where they created fake news websites with copycat URLs that are designed to seem real. This is all on the heels of previous reports from the federal government outlining other political disinformation campaigns coming from China, Iran, and of course, as always, Russia. It's a huge issue for the United States and should be decried by anyone who believes in free and fair democratic elections. But there's already pushback from, you guessed it, the beneficiary of this Russian propaganda,

GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. So we're going to break it all down with three experts, Brandi Zdrozny, Julia Davis, and Alex Stamos. Julia is a columnist for the Daily Beast, an investigative reporter, and the creator of the Russian Media Monitor. Alex is the chief information security officer at Sentinel-1, the founder of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and the former chief security officer at Facebook. And Brandy is

senior reporter at NBC News, who covers the internet, especially politics, tech, and extremism. Our expert question comes from Nina Jankowicz. Nina is the co-founder and chief executive of the American Sunlight Project and former executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board. Julia, Alex, and Brandi, thank you for coming on on. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much. Okay, so let's start with the DOJ indictment related to Russia's disinformation. Brandy, this is your beat. Can you explain what's in the indictment and what's happening here, just for people who haven't followed it closely?

Sure. So basically what the government says is that there were employees of Russia's RT network, and they were basically funding this scheme, I guess, right, that sent about $10 million to a bunch of U.S. creators that we are very familiar with. I followed their work for years, and it was huge news. Just for you to know, they're Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool, but go ahead. Yeah, and then you had some lower level creators, right,

including Lauren Southern, that big, big, big names in the alt-right. And so this indictment basically alleged that there were two RT employees and they were working through this intermediary and it was a Tennessee company called Tenant Media and it was set up by a woman named Lauren Chen who was also an alt-light, alt-right creator on YouTube. And she was sort of giving the marching orders from the RT people down to the creators. The creators,

Tim Poole and the rest of them, said, we had no idea. But that was the news, that the right-wing creators that people have loved, have millions of followers, are actually Russian agents. Right. Unwitting. Unwitting or witting. I mean, because— They say unwitting. And what about the doppelganger affidavit?

And the doppelganger indictment, which was really, really helpful because it gave us some of the whys. It sort of fleshed out some of those marching orders in a really helpful way. the why. It sort of fleshed out some of those marching orders in a really helpful way. But the doppelganger affidavit basically said that the U.S. Justice Department was seizing a bunch of websites that had been used by Russian companies to plant fake news stories. Washington Post, you know,.co instead of.com or whatever it was. There was a Fox News one. And they laundered sort of fake news stories and sort of propaganda through these fake news sites. Right. So Russia was allegedly paying conservative influencers lots of money to essentially make more videos like the ones they were already making. Why do you think they chose these specific people?

So if you look at the indictment for Doppelganger, it has one of the documents inside is this internal document from this Russian company that basically said, here's what we want to do in the USA. We want Donald Trump to win. We want to create stories around these sorts of narratives. And there was like a list of 10 things. One, that crime is rampant. Two, immigrants are awful. Three, LGBTQ people are perverts and Two, immigrants are awful. Three, LGBTQ people are perverts and, you know, are terrible and are taking over the country. DEI and people of color are, you know, hurting the white man, basically. Like there was this sort of list of terrible narratives that Russia wanted to put forth in America. And when you look at the videos from Tim Pool and Dave Rubin

and Lauren Southern, et cetera, that checked off everything on the wish list. So you're right, like Benny Johnson was already sort of making these videos. So it was a, they had an eager and willing group of people willing to share this narrative. As you were in charge of Facebook security in 2016. How do they compare to what you saw then in terms of sophistication, in terms of political impact? This seems pretty basic. Find people you agree with. The Nazis did this during World War II. Find people you agree with and put a narrative out. I'm thinking there were several times the Nazis tried to do this, often through government officials, elected officials in Congress, or in other ways to try to put this

propaganda out by mail, direct mail, etc. Well, I think what we're seeing is that the Russian campaigns are actually coming under direct control of the Kremlin. So the 2016 campaigns, there was a campaign that was being run by the GRU, the hacking campaign. That was not that large, right? Like the GRU campaign could have been run by just a handful of people in the GRU and, you know, was involved in, as we all know, hacking the DNC, hacking John Podesta's email and such, but did not require a lot of people. What we've been seeing over the last several years is in a reaction to the indictments in the U.S. and what's happened on social media and such is that Russia's tried to find a bunch of different ways to get their message back into the U.S. media. And they're now willing to spend tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps in the end, we'll find they're spending

hundreds of millions of dollars. This is compared to, you know, when we look back in 2016, the campaign was, you know, run out of Progozhin's companies as effectively a side project of the Internet Research Agency. This is the man Putin had who died in the plane crash. Right, who in 2016 was a best friend of Putin and then ended up turning against him and then dying in a tragic, totally unpredictable plane crash. Being very, very dangerous to turn against Vladimir Putin, right? Plane crash, you know, being very, very dangerous to turn against Vladimir Putin, right? And so, you know, now what we're seeing is that these campaigns are being run either out of media companies like RT that are known to be directly funded by the Russian government and under the command and control of the Kremlin or other propaganda outlet. So I think actually what we're seeing is the centralization of control of these entities outside of the what used to be kind of this broad network that this is being pulled in so that the Kremlin has more direct control. And it's not particularly sophisticated to fund,

you know, toadies, essentially, correct? I mean, well, this isn't about sophistication, it is about message control, right? And I think what you're seeing here is they're willing to spend a lot of money because this is being seen as a strategic goal. In this case, in particular, like Brandy said, it's very useful now to see what they're trying to do and the pushing of Ukraine over and over again. And the fact that they're trying to push Ukraine shows you how important this is. You know, if you take a step back here, when you think about 2016, Putin did not like Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons, mostly because he thought that she was involved in maybe trying to overthrow him, right? So that

was just kind of a grudge match. It was not like a long strategic play. In this case, Russia is involved in a stalemate war with Ukraine. Ukrainians are currently occupying Russian territory, right? There is no real out for Vladimir Putin right now in Ukraine, other than the possibility of former President Trump once again taking the presidency, of which he has openly said that he would, quote unquote, end the war, which is widely interpreted as meaning that he would push for the Ukrainians to really the only way you could do that would be to cut the Ukrainians off and force the Ukrainians to the negotiating table by saying you're cutting them off. And then to also do that, for that to work, one, you have to get Trump elected. But the other thing you have to do

is you have to convince the rest of the Republican Party that that's okay. You basically have to neutralize all the traditional hawks. And so that is the long play here that you're seeing this investment is trying to convince like the Mitch McConnell's and the entire Republican Senate and all the traditional Republicans that there's a groundswell of support among Republican voters. By paying for that. Right. To go against Ukraine. And I think that is what you're seeing the outcome here of years and years of investment in that area. Okay. Julia, you've watched a lot of Russian state television.

You've seen mouthpieces for the state give official line on everything from Ukraine to the Olympics to Donald Trump. When you compare how American conservative influence describe the U.S. versus how Russian elites on state TV describe America, I mean, the connection feels obvious and the messaging is consistent. Can you talk a little bit about comparing the two? Because they sound the same, pretty much, but these people presumably weren't given the script, they just were given the money in this case. Yes, Cara, they do sound a lot of the same. And sometimes listening to Russian state TV, I hear the same talking points that they speak on Fox News because they are in alignment. And what Russia wants is to elect Trump, although for very different reasons than the Republicans are thinking about. They believe that him coming back to power will change

everything in their favor. He will cut off support to Ukraine and they will just be able to take it. And that's what they're holding out for. It's actually giving them a lot of hope to avoid negotiations. But also in the same sense, while they mimic a lot of Fox News talking points, they basically talk about Republicans and their voters as being completely stupid. They also talk about Trump being stupid, and they love that for us because they think he's easy to manipulate, and so are the general voters because they know that in America, public opinion means a lot. So they want to influence public opinion to the point where the politicians start to follow that line themselves. And if the public says that Ukraine is corrupt and Ukraine is our enemy, then perhaps the support will be undermined. So that was their goal. I've heard them talking about this for years now. Head of our team, Margarita Simonyan, openly said, what we need

are influencers with large followings that are American, not Russian, so they will be received there as though that's their authentic point of view. And she was talking about doing these covert operations. Since at least 2022, she was boasting on state television, which I've been reporting and including. It's even in my book where she spoke about it, that they have succeeded, that these covert projects are underway and doing exactly what they have set out to accomplish. And now that these revelations have come to surface, she again came on state television to boast that it's actually much bigger than we realized. She claimed that their English-speaking projects have gotten over 14 billion views.

So she's obviously talking about something far beyond what we already know has been uncovered, and they're very proud of that. They're not hiding it. They're proud of what they're doing. Absolutely. So, Brandi, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin are portraying themselves as victims. When someone offered to pay them obscene amounts of money, they didn't ask basic questions.

It's so sad. They're not victims. If anybody wants to victimize me with $100,000 a week, I will send you my Venmo. Right, right, right. You would never do this, actually. These are self-styled truth-tellers who are supposedly uncovering hidden knowledge

that's been covered up by the lamestream media. I think that's pretty much how they put it. And the inability to see the money was a bribe. Talk a little bit about that, because I think portraying themselves as victims is laughable at the very least. Well, I would say portraying themselves as victims is sort of at the heart of their identities anyway.

Grievance culture is well embedded in their messaging and always has been. You know, we are conservatives. We are being censored. Nobody wants you to hear the truth. They style their channels and they style Tenet Media on, this is stuff you won't hear other places. And you know, obviously, we know there's a reason why we're not hearing that stuff, because it's false, it's made up. Especially Benny Johnson's particularly awful at spreading things that are just obviously not true. I'm really struck by the idea that I've been covering this for a long time.

And in 2016 and 2020, you know, people sort of were honestly and rightly interested in, you know, what the Russian line was, right? Like, what were the tactics? What was the point? What was the point? And almost every person that I talked to, every expert, I think Alex has said this to me before alt-right, alt-light internet movement where the more obvious hateful voices like Richard Spencer, for example, sort of got thrown to the wayside. But these folks who had like a lighter message became what was now kind of mainstream Republican voices in media. Yeah. And so when you're like, well, why them? I think a big reason why them is because one, the narrative is there, right? It's already the established narrative that Russia wanted, that you do great numbers on YouTube, but part of the

indictment said that the Russians were actively asking through Lauren Chen and through that Tennessee company to please promote this stuff to your outside audiences. So if they have millions of followers on their own YouTubes, which Benny would promote some of these narratives on his single YouTube too, not just the Tenet Media stuff. But if they were like pushing this to their followers, that's an exponential increase in number of eyeballs that's on this stuff. So they had the audience, they have the narrative. And again, I'm just sort of struck by what so many researchers told me, like we're doing well on our own. It seems like that is definitely true. And, you know, Russia just found a way to pay these people. Right. Like Brandy said, the tenant numbers weren't great, but have the Russians been successful in moving right-wing public opinion toward Russia? and setting people at odds against one another and clash of the ideas that undermines our support for Ukraine.

But that's just part of it, basically. And as they say themselves, what they mainly want is they want civil war in the United States. So that's their bigger agenda and always has been. And so that's one of the things that they're pursuing. And I hear this repeated by all of their top experts and government officials on multiple state media networks that what they really want is civil war in the United States, and then will be too busy to pay attention to what they're doing. And that's their top goal. And that's why they pick these people with large followings, because that way they have the deepest reach,

and it's not solely against Ukraine. It's against American society as a whole. Yeah, the Civil War idea is really very specific. Talk about how they want to deepen existing divisions in American society and why that is the goal, just to keep us busy, essentially. Yes, they keep us busy. And also for years, they have been dreaming that the United States will collapse and fall apart. And they see civil war as a path to that. And they always say that they're rooting for Trump because he is the best way to civil war, because they see their words verbatim as the shooting will start immediately if Trump comes to power,

because he will try to dominate and subjugate everyone else and start these bloody deportations and mass arrests. And so they see Trump as their best way to ensure that there's civil war in the United States. Ideally, they want us to be so overtaken by turmoil and violence that we just become a regional player because we're too busy to deal with the rest of the world and step away from the global scene. And that's what they want the most. They call Trump the destroyer of America, and they're disappointed he didn't get to do what he wanted in the first term. And they say he will be unchained if he gets the second term,

because this time, there will be no guardrails, and he will get to wreak havoc like they wanted him to do in the first term. And Russia benefits if we step away from the global arena. So, Alex, does that strike what you saw many years ago, and this idea of civil war within the United States? So, yes, no, again, I do think there's a difference here. I think, yes, in 2016, it was a much broader set of goals of trying to stoke division in the United States. But I do believe over the last several years, what we've seen out of Russian disinformation is it's much more targeted. It's much more like what we see out of China, right? Like Chinese disinformation in the US, which is not as broad as Russia, is very targeted around the things that matter to them. And what's happened with Russia is they

have a real goal, which is like, look at what's happening in the broad, like just take a real step back. The big movie right now among conservatives is the Reagan biopic, right? Yeah. In which Dennis Quaid goes up there and tells some actor playing Gorbachev, tear down this wall. big movie right now uh among conservatives is the reagan biopic right yeah in which dennis quaid goes up there and tells some actor playing gorbachev tear down this wall right um so like that's amazing right that like if you just think about just in the last six seven years of the eight years of the what has changed in this political party, that now a significant part of the base of this political party hates Ukraine. Why would anybody in the Republican Party hate Ukraine? When you

ask why are they paying these guys when they already make this content, it's because of salience. It's because normally Tim Pool and these other folks would be making normal culture war videos, right? They'd be talking about the woke left and, you know, these culture war topics, because normally people don't care about Ukraine. Ukrainians have no actual impact on the lives of Americans conservatives. And so you pay these people so that they make, so they talk about a topic that actually is not relevant because it is relevant to the actual strategic interests of Russia. And that is what has been effective over these years. And I think, like, we just have to, if you ask, has it been effective? My answer is spectacularly.

Right. So Tim Pool is gone, completely unhinged in his rants on Ukraine. Let's listen. Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy. Being funded by the Democrats, I will stress again, one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. So it's not a huge leap to be like, yeah, that could be Russian propaganda. Brandy, do you have any reason to believe that he or other influencers implicated in this indictment could actually be Russian assets and not just these so-called useful idiots? So first, I just want to jump in on the last narrative that we talked about, which I think was really interesting because in the planning documents that are included in the other indictment for Doppelganger, one of the points is that it's pointless supremacy first and that there's no point, no one will be a friend of Russia. It will never happen. So instead, you have to frame things as, you know, America first.

How does siding with the Russians against Ukraine become a patriotic duty of Americans? And so that is, it's a clear tactic and it's just, it's so effective. It's a clear tactic, and it's just, it's so effective. Regarding the, if they, you know, did they know, how could they not have known? You know, I can only say that they seem to suggest that they have no idea. I think it's, again, if you read the indictment, crazy. And I'm just a humble reporter who does not make millions of dollars every year, and I do not make, you know, $400,000 making 15-minute videos. But if a benevolent benefactor were to come through a new Tennessee company to me and say, I'm willing to give you $5 million a year to make these videos, I might do a little bit of homework on the person that's behind these videos.

And according to the indictment, the Tennessee company offered them this incredible PDF. It has a guy, it looks like a stock photo-ish thing. He's staring wistfully out the window of this jet. And it has basically a CV that has lists where he's from. And then it says, my mission, my mission is to fund conservative, a new conservative media network because I've been around the world and I've seen that it's just the narrative. It's just not true. And that seemed to be enough. Now, again, being the dogged reporter that I am, I Googled this person's name immediately after seeing this PDF and realized there's no Google presence. This person does not exist. Right. No. Would you say a man who started a private equity bank, who started an investment bank and a private equity fund might have a Google presence, Brandy? Also, like, could you come up with a more villainous name than Edouard Gregorian?

Like, it's just, it's too much. Like, the writer's room, it's just too much. You can't write this stuff. So anyway, yeah, the due diligence is non-existent as long as this is all we have to go on, what we see in the indictment. It's wild. It's wild. of an accepted thing for influencers, political influencers to accept money. I think something that did not get a lot of notice, but might become a big story is Ben Smith and Semaphore had a scoop where they talked about how there was kind of conservative influencers were being pulled into these Zoom calls that are being organized by a mysterious group that said that they're directly paying these influencers for them to tweet and to push certain messages. And that the most prominent of them was George Santos. The other ones haven't been named yet. At least

one of them was paid $20,000 in Zelle payments. And then now the person who made those payments has disappeared. So their phone number has been disconnected. And the name they were using was somebody who's related to the Trump campaign who is saying it's not them. And it's not that guy's phone number. It's not his email address. So there are a bunch of people who are giving money directly to influencers who we have no idea who they are and where the money's coming from. We'll be back in a minute. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?

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fighting the anti-colonialist war. Talk a little bit about left-wing propaganda, because it's much less discussed, but it exists. Yeah, there was a, I mean, this isn't the first time that Russia has paid seemingly unwitting people to do its bidding and spread propaganda. I think there was another campaign, Mafik Media, I think it was called, and it was run out of German. And that had more of like a left-wing sort of anti-establishment. That was the sort of the turn there. So it does happen. That was the sort of the turn there. So it does happen again, if the if the point is to cause discord, then any way that that can be done is great. But I do think that it's a lot less common to find progressive left wing people that are this entrenched in media the way that the the far right has built its media empire. I also am particularly focused on the right wing, so I could definitely be missing something. But people have

always asked me generally, like, why don't you talk about the left wing disinformation? I'm like, it's just not as prominent. It's just not. Right. Julia, how did they look at it in Russia, just wherever, any port in the storm that will work for them? Absolutely. They don't care the right or the left. As long as it furthers their agenda, as long as it furthers divisions, or someone could speak against supporting Ukraine or any of the other topics they care about, it's of absolutely no concern to them, right or left. They're happy to exploit either side. And they openly say that as well. Far left, far right suits them just well. It just so happens that the right wing is more frequently useful in that agenda, but they use

both. Talking about right-wing Russian propaganda, do you suspect there's more undetected Russian influence campaigns, Alex? The indictment mentions multiple covert distribution channels. Is that more indictments? What does that signal from your perspective? And what are you seeing? Yeah, I expect that there's going to be more of this. What's happening is the DOJ actually has a policy of that they do not want to interfere in elections. So I'm afraid that perhaps, unfortunately, this came a little late in the process that this might be them dumping out what they have as quickly as possible before the election. what they have as quickly as possible before the election, that they kind of hurried up and got this out and took care of this when they could, that this will be the last we hear, unfortunately. And Trump is already pushing back, correct? Yeah. So I expect we're probably not going to hear much else unless there's something really out there. The other thing that we haven know, we haven't talked about is, you know, there are

other countries involved. Right, right. I'm going to get to that in a second. Every episode, we ask an expert to send us a question. This time, we have someone who has a personal stake in this fight. Let's hear it. Hi, this is Nina Jenkiewicz, disinformation researcher and the CEO of the American Sunlight Project. My big question is, what did last week's indictment and affidavit and the other government disclosures we've seen over the past few months mean for the country's fight against foreign interference? Given the attacks on disinformation researchers, government entities, and trust and safety functions we've seen over the past two years, is this enough to help keep the election safe? So for those who don't know, Nina was the former executive director of a very poorly named disinformation governance board of the United States. She was essentially run off by right-wing trolls such as Tucker Carlson and many others. You've had this experience at the Stanford

Internet Observatory. So Alex, you start and then Brandy and Julia. Yeah, I mean, I think with this indictment and the Iranian action show is that election interference by foreign adversaries is not a hoax. Like, America's adversaries want to influence our elections. It should not be a partisan issue. Both political parties should think that that is not an appropriate way that you should influence U.S. elections. Both parties should say that is not appropriate for foreign interference using either disinformation or cyber operations. Brandy? Yeah, I think that from 2016 until today, we've learned a lot about reporting and how we want to report these things out. I think that there was an early moment with social media being so new, these campaigns, these specific campaigns being so new, that we were sort of sounding an alarm all the time, or it was like, this is happening, can you believe it? And now we've grown older and wiser, and we can temper

our responses to really informing the public, right? And it's that, is the election safe? I think Nina just asked. Yes, we have incredibly safe elections, right? And the United States is incredibly secure, incredibly safe. We should all feel good about the security of our vote. However, it's also true that foreign influences are trying to influence our campaign, are trying to influence the way that we speak to each other, are trying to influence our opinions.

And so we can know how those campaigns work, whether it's the doppelganger thing or through these right-wing influencers or through several other prongs or through state media, as Julia so well documents. So understanding how this stuff is happening is really important so we can react to it appropriately. Julia? Yes, I think that it's very important and it should actually matter more than I see their reaction to it.

You know, people did get so used to discounting the whole Russia, Russia, Russia, followed by Trump. And they're kind of tuning it out at this point. And they're kind of tuning it out at this point. And the Republicans are portraying it as really not that big of a deal, just a few websites. So I see that impact is not being as important exactly on that side of the spectrum where it matters most to get people more concerned about what they consume and what they spread and what the source of it is. So people coming to the conclusions of who to vote for, they're still very vulnerable. And the reaction on that side is just unfortunately not impactful enough as it should be. All right. I want to talk a bit about Chinese and Iranian disinformation. Before we leave Russia, I have to ask about Telegram. It's been in the news since Pavel Durov, its founder, was arrested last month in Paris. He allegedly broke French criminal laws, including around child sexual abuse material. But Telegram is also a crucial asset for spreading Russian disinformation. Brandy, explain how Telegram works and then tell us how Russia uses it to spread disinformation? I mean, basically, Telegram is a messaging board,

a forum, and people use it for all kinds of different reasons. The Russians use it very particularly, and it's sort of, there's a pipeline of disinformation that comes from Russia and has many stops along the way. Not all the stops are hit, but almost always there is a point where a fake story is laundered through Telegram, through a Russian influencer and through Telegram. And then the next stop is usually X or some sort of American social media company where that is taken and translated into English. But it's a stop on the disinformation train for sure. It's also a stop on, there was a big indictment yesterday about Terragram, which is this community on Telegram that is white extremist

plans, terrorist actions, helps support terrorism from the sort of white grievance point of view and white nationalist point of view, and also like creates this sort of fandom of white terrorism. So it's not a great place to be. I understand there are free speech issues and lots of things that maybe others can talk about. But from where I stand, I'd do well without it. Yeah. So, Julia, the Russian military used Telegram for internal communications. They're apparently afraid if Durov turns his server keys over to the French, then their communications could be compromised. Now, they have a complicated relationship with Durov. They essentially chased him out of the country after he refused to turn over data on Ukrainian protesters. By the way, Telegram is used by Ukraine quite a lot. But now they've come to his defense. Talk a little bit about how Durov is portrayed in Russian media and how that's shifted. And how important is he to, say, the Russian military? their missiles against Ukraine, and they were quite concerned that if that information was available to the West, it would undermine them greatly. They were talking about

their own failure to build some other system where they wouldn't be dependent on Durov. The reason they like Telegram, it's because it's free for all. Anything goes there. And from disinformation to gory messaging to war propaganda, and they're obviously very surprisingly using it for their military communications. And so there are serious concerns. They have told everybody to basically try to stop using it in that way until they know for sure what is happening and whether it will be accessible and compromised by the West or this arrest. Durov himself, they don't really like that much because he didn't go along with what the Russian government wanted him to do and then left the country. And a lot of prominent state media figures actually

questioned why is Russia trying to help him? Why should they even care when he is not acting as a Russian citizen and has other citizenships? So their concerns are more selfish is just to see whether or not he will hand over the keys that will open them up for more scrutiny. But right now they're supporting him. Right now they are, yes. They are. And Alex, how do you look at this incident? I mean, I'm surprised the French did this. Yeah, I mean, all the indications are this is not like a great French plan. This is specifically

a decision by a new French court and police department that was set up specifically around child safety. Telegram is by far the worst platform when it comes to child safety of the major platforms. They are the only platform that in our Stanford work, we did a comparison of platform policies. And their policy is you should not post child sexual abuse material in any public surfaces. They specifically add that modifier, which nobody else does. Everybody else says, don't do bad stuff anywhere. And so it's a confluence of two things. One, their policy is basically wink, wink, nod, nod to that. They say, we do not turn over data to law enforcement. And then they've created, Duroff himself has created this ambiguity around encryption, where they basically imply that these huge Telegram groups, which have

tens, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of people are end-end encrypted, they are not. They've told people basically they're encrypted, but they're not. They just decide not to turn over information. And so as a result, Telegram has become kind of the centerpiece of the world's black market for this kind of material. And it was inevitable that eventually some Western country would eventually arrest him. And so what it sounds like is he landed, his passport got scanned, and this, as you would imagine, they have probably hundreds of cases that involve Telegram. And one of them hit, and they decided to finally arrest him for it.

Now, what's interesting is that Telegram has now announced, all of a sudden, they're changing their policies, right? So they've started to change their policies on their website. They've started to make kind of a big deal of them making it possible. It never was possible to report chat channels for this kind of stuff, so they've added reporting mechanisms. So they're kind of slamming in some anti-child abuse tools really fast. We'll see if that has any kind of impact. But it's a significant change. What happens here to Durov? Does he, or any other, any other leader, Mark Zuckerberg, anyone else with these? you know, a Twitter or Facebook where like you can have, I mean, there's, you know, people are comparing like the Brazil with X with this. And the difference there is in Brazil, whatever you

think about what's going on, you're talking about political disinformation, which is like the hardest content to decide whether or not you think it should be. That's like a real difficult democratic issue of whether or not you think it should be banned. Every single developed country in the world thinks that this content should be banned, right? So, like, there's no real issue here other than trying to decide how far do you want to go, right? So, like, I think in this case, Telegram, what they were doing, it was absolutely inevitable that this was going to happen. So, I don't think it's going to attach to anybody else, because effectively every other platform in the world, including X, including Facebook,

they have child abuse problems, but they at least try. And when you point out to them you have a problem, they will do something about it. They report issues. France, just like the United States, has a law that if you find stuff, you have to report it to the appropriate authorities. And Telegram was in violation of that probably hundreds of thousands of times over. So at least applying that law will probably get Durov out of some problem. So before I move on, I have to ask about another billionaire tech founder. How is Elon seen in Russia? And then I'm going to talk about Iran and China before we go. On one hand, he's providing the Ukrainian military with Starlink technology.

On the other, he's repeated extensive Kremlin talking points. He posts a vicious trollish content that Russia wants to spread. Julia, you first and then Brandy. How do you look at his role here? He's unfortunately providing them with a lot more propaganda talking points that they frequently reuse in their state media. So they see him as a very important influencer who is speaking out against Ukraine, who is supporting Trump, and they're echoing that as much as they can. And they're making constant appeals to him on their state media, hoping it will get translated and go to him, urging him to stop supplying Starlink to Ukraine and come over

to their side. So they see him as a very useful figure in this sense. And they're very happy to repeat almost everything he has to say. Brandy? I think, you know, Alex was talking about how moderation decisions around disinformation and political stuff is hard, right? It's really, it's difficult. And not everybody's in agreement, and that's fine. But Twitter used to be run by people who were really driven by some sort of North Star, right? There was an idea that they wanted to have healthy conversations. Like that was the whole spiel constantly. public square, and I should say X, if X is now the public square, and Elon has invited back all of the white nationalists and has allowed hate speech, then it's created a kind of public square that's actually pretty toxic and noxious. In terms of, you know, what Russia would think about that, that's exactly what they want. So again, very aligned conservative movement in America and Russian movement, that idea that, you know, censorship is targeting the right wing and free speech is under attack. That's what Elon says, too.

And so he's he is the savior in terms of they literally call him like, thank you for saving free speech, Elon. So he's the king. We'll be back in a minute. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories,

and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't

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Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere and you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. All right, let's close out by talking about China and Iranian propaganda. Alex, as you noted, it's not as active as the Russians, but it's very targeted and they're definitely out there. The Chinese are being relatively cautious because they don't want to upset bilateral relations too much, but using AI to create so-called spamouflage where hacked or fake American accounts try to spread anti-Western sentiment instead of trying to elect a specific candidate.

It's not very good yet, but talk about Chinese disinformation. And I assume this spamouflage will only get better. come to talk to you about it. The other thing that you see from China is a lot like what we saw here with this influencer campaign, which is that they've been building up influencers who talk a lot about how great China is, right? So especially post, the two big things that changed in for China was the Hong Kong protests and COVID. And so after those things really affected their, how they looked in the West, they really started to invest in young influencers. The New York Times actually had a great series on this of YouTube influencers who do like these travel logs through China. And some of it just seems like just normal like, hey, I'm traveling.

I'm seeing this. And then some of it's a little more evil of like, oh, here I am in Xinjiang and I don't see any labor camps. Everything seems fine here, right? Like here I am talking to ethnic minorities and they seem like they're treated great by the Chinese Communist Party. And so their propaganda is much more about how people see China and supporting the Chinese Communist Party. And then during the COVID era, a lot of it was about COVID, blaming the United States for COVID, deflecting away from any Chinese responsibility for COVID. for COVID deflecting away from any Chinese responsibility for COVID.

Right. So, Julia, the Iranians are using AI and they are proxies for some of these bigger countries. The Iranians, though, this time are trying to defeat Donald Trump. Besides AI, they're using phishing scams to try to hack into campaigns' emails. I know you're not an expert in Iranian strategy, but they are often a proxy for Russia at the same time. How does that work when they have a different candidate in the race they want to win? That seems like an obvious conflict, and they're clearly learning a lot from the Russians, even though their interests in this sphere may not align. So I see them potentially becoming more effective in the future because their cooperation with Russia is definitely growing. In this aspect, certainly Russians have their candidate and they are definitely not on board with Iranians going the other way. the other way. So the Iranian government successfully hacked a Trump campaign operative's email and distributed information from his emails to major news organizations. So far,

none of them has published it, which they did with Hillary Clinton. Brandy, and then Alex, is this the right call? Well, I just want to notice that today is September. It is not, in fact, October. And so I, you know, yeah, we know newspaper has published the initial get that they got. I was not forwarded those documents. I hear that it wasn't so great. It wasn't something, a wild story that merited publication anyway. It was sort of some internal documents, maybe about J.D. Vance, et cetera. But we also know that they hacked Roger Stone.

They got into Roger Stone's emails. So what they have isn't exactly clear yet. And I think that we might not have seen the last of this. So again, like whether it was, I think, I hope we've learned some lessons from the DNC hack, I really hope that we do. But I, a lot of people that I talked to have suggested that Iran could just set up a website, right? And make it make all the stuff that they've got searchable. And, you know, we'll have a WikiLeaks thing again. What will the new Pizzagate be, which came out of that leak? I mean, there's just a lot of unknowns.

I think it's really early. What about you, Alex? What do you think the Iranians are going to be up to? Yeah, I agree with Brandy. I think it is only September, and we call it an October surprise for a reason, right? You know, they have Roger Stone's email as well as the email of several people inside the campaign. One, it demonstrates that, again, like I said before, election interference should be a bipartisan issue. And this is why it's important for both political parties to believe it's a real issue because then they will protect themselves.

political parties to believe it's a real issue because then they will protect themselves. I think in this case, we don't know exactly what they have. But like Brandy said, the Iranians can just dump it out publicly. And that's expected. I expect what happens in 2016. Yes, some of it went to Politico. Some of it went to a variety of outlets. But then also you had the Russians creating their own personas like DC leaks and Guccifer 2 to do kind of direct dumping out to the public and through useful idiots like WikiLeaks. And so I think the Iranians have a lot of options. I fully expect that we'll see all those documents and raw emails before the election is over. Whether or not they'll have any kind of influence is an interesting question. I mean, I'm not sure, you know, anything that can be published will change. American society has hardened a lot, right, since 2016, right?

So I'm not sure this is a campaign where people's beliefs about, you know, these candidates are going to change that much. But again, I don't even think it, it doesn't even have to be explosive, right? It doesn't even have to be crazy. has changed my world and all of our world so so incredibly like came out of you know a q anon and and pizzagate and all that came out of some innocuous things about emails about pizza and napkins right and an artist it just it doesn't have to be anything it just has to have the veneer of something that they're hiding to create these consequences that we can't even foresee right now but in the long run i mean it demonstrates this is going to be with us forever right is that enemies of democracy are enemies of democracy right like they will there are going to

be autocracies that do want that want to see american democracy fail they will different countries are going to have different enemies and they're going against both sides what the you know the dni the fbi said was that the the Iranians were hacking both Democrats and Republicans. Now, what they do with the information they gather might be different, right? But in all cases going forward, both parties are going to have to take this incredibly seriously. They need to not politicize it and they need to get back together. I mean, I hate to sound like some kind of cliche, but the truth is, is like when we, when Congress gets back together and we have a new president inaugurated in January, I'd really like I hope we get past this idea of calling out hoax and attacking researchers and attacking CISA.

Well, that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen. Yeah, I hope that the fact that both campaigns were attacked this this time, puts this whole period behind, and that we can make cybersecurity, especially of elections overall, back to a bipartisan thing because Russia is not going to stop. Iran is not going to stop. China is not going to stop. Who they support in each election is going to flop back and forth for the rest of our lives.

This is what it's going to be like. It's never going to end. I get that point. I get that point. But Trump is already calling it a hoax. So we're closing up. I want to circle back to the beginning. Reuben Poole and Johnson worked at the Young Turks, Vice News and BuzzFeed News, respectively, before becoming right wing influencers. Brandy, let me read you something you said in an interview in 2021 when you were asked about other disinformation peddlers. I think that these people can reinvent themselves super easily, and I think they can basically peddle whatever sort of far-right talking point they want and get into this new fan

club or, you know, become leaders because they're good at it. They're good at media manipulation. They're good at conversation hijacking. They have a network, and they utilize this network to go wherever the wind blows them and the dollars push them. This was incredibly prescient. Talk about the financial incentives built into online engagement that can lead to right-wing disinformation, even when the

Russians aren't paying for it. Yeah, I mean, Tim Pool lives on a compound. He is extremely rich. It's a joke that, oh, you know, $100,000 per video wasn't anything to him and the answer is kind of no there is a great big financial market for creators right-wing creators to make content that makes people feel mad and it that's not going away and I know I don't think they needed the Russia money but it it sure it sure helped sure was nice and Julia, how do you look at that? They gave them more money. They don't need it at this point. It just was a means to control some of that agenda that's being put out there. Did they need it?

Probably not. But it allowed the Russians access. And as you've heard those inflammatory messages about Ukraine, they delivered it for them. And so to them, it was worth paying for. And unfortunately, those influencers, if they are able to skate and claim that they were unaware of who paid them, they will very easily keep on going and pretend like nothing ever happened. And the Russians will keep buying this influence because it's working for them. And Kara, just one more thing. The question that

I have beyond like, are they going to return this money? Is there a consequence? Like, even if you didn't know, right? Are there any consequences to being found out to be a Russian asset, right? Once you know now, does it change anything at all? And, you know, my sad answer is it feels like probably not, right? It feels like it won't actually matter somehow, which is crazy. Right. So one of the great paradoxes here is that free society is more susceptible to foreign disinformation. In our case, that could lead to the election of Donald Trump, which would make us probably less free.

So I want to hear from each of you. Lastly, what could the U.S. be doing to protect us from foreign propaganda while maintaining freedom? Julia, you first, then Brandy, and then Alex. You have mentioned everyone getting together in some kind of kumbaya moment and realizing it. I don't see it happening. But Julia, what should we do to stop this? Well, I think one good way would be for our media to be more clear about what our adversaries are trying to accomplish to hopefully make people more aware that all this strife is harming us and helping our adversaries. and to make them aware of which talking points Russia wants to spread or China or Iran, so that when they hear it, they won't immediately think that this is authentic and domestic. So that would be one thing is just to increase this literacy. And also a lot of people don't seem to understand that countries like Russia want our downfall. understand that countries like Russia want our downfall. They may not realize the gravity of this threat and their aim that they don't want just for us to stop funding Ukraine. They want

us to disintegrate. So making people aware might help. I literally just had a conversation with a tech person. Russia's our friend. I'm like, oh my God, stop it. Like, stop it. Like when they were listening to some idiotic podcast that explained how they're our friends, but they're not our friends. Not our friends. Brandy? I think something is wrong and broken in our country where people like Tempool and Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin and all of these other clowns have the audience that they do. That is a problem. It is a problem with us. It's a problem with media literacy. It's a problem with political polarization. And I just want us as collectively as a nation, as information seekers to stop depending on these crazy people, these voices that are hateful and wrong, and just clearly

in this to make a buck off of you. I want us to stop that. Alex, finish it up. I want to see more of this. I want to see more investigations into the money. The First Amendment protects speech. If you truly believe that Ukraine's the enemy of the United States, you have an absolute right to go say that to your audience. But you do not have a First Amendment protected right to be paid by America's enemies. And so if there's anything the FBI and Treasury Department are good at, it's tracing the money. And so I want to see much more aggressive tracing of the money. I want to see the Chinese influence money. I want to see the Iranian money. I want to see the Russian money that's coming into our country. I want to see it traced.

I want to see how it's flowing in. And I want to see people being named and shamed. If they're not going to be prosecuted because the bar is really high, then I want to see a lot more of these indictments where they're named so that we as Americans know who is paying for this influence. Yeah, absolutely. Tim, Benny, Dave, you should be ashamed of yourselves. How's that? How's that for them Dave, you should be ashamed of yourselves. How's that?

How's that for them? They should absolutely be ashamed of themselves. Anyway, thank you all very much. It's a pernicious problem and so obvious that this is what they would do. And in some ways, you don't even blame Russia because this is their job to make a mess of our country. So hopefully with more investigations and more talking about it, people will begin to realize how easily manipulated they are and how it's happened before. Anyway, thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Kara. Thank you, Kara. Thank you, Kara. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Megan Burney, Jolie Myers, and Sheena Ozaki. Special thanks to Kaylin Lynch. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get $100,000 a video.

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