Archived version

Two days after U.S. authorities accused two employees of Russian state media network RT of coordinating an online network aimed at influencing the 2024 presidential election, more than 400 posts by Tenet Media, the online content company at the heart of the case, were still accessible on TikTok, unlabeled and untouched.

So too were Tenet Media's nearly 2,500 Instagram videos and more than 4,000 posts on social network X, along with its posts on Facebook and video platform Rumble.

Of all the major platforms where Tenet distributed its videos, so far only Alphabet's YouTube has taken action penalizing the company, pulling down the main Tenet Media channel along with four others operated by owner Lauren Chen on Thursday.

[...]

The platforms' apparent inaction on the campaign is a striking departure from the aggressive efforts they have touted in recent years to expose secretive foreign propaganda campaigns, reflecting both the novelty of the tactics allegedly used and the fraught politics of policing content posted by real people inside the United States.

It also exposes a fresh challenge faced by the platforms as Russia increasingly turns to unwitting American social media stars to covertly influence voters ahead of U.S. elections this year, a sort of digital update to Cold War-era practices of laundering messages through journalists or front media outlets, according to disinformation researchers

"What we're ultimately grappling with is a problem that exists in the real world. It's manifesting on social media in the sense that the entity has a presence there, but it isn't a social media problem per se," said Olga Belogolova, a disinformation professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and former head of influence operations policy at Meta.

[...]