Jamie Sarkonak: Russian-funded YouTubers don't hold a candle to China's meddling in Canada | National Post | Jamie Sarkonak:
September 10, 2024 - "In Canada, it’s been months since politicians and others across the country were declared to have provided 'witting and unwitting' assistance to foreign governments — and we’re still waiting to learn their names. So, when the Americans announced the discovery of a foreign interference plot last Wednesday, it was a relief to see them put the details on the table.
"Alleged in the indictment were illegal activities by a pair of Russian propagandists carried out as they contracted two Canadian influencers in American right-wing media to produce content. Some 2,000 videos were uploaded in the scheme starting in November 2023, at least 51 of which had something to do with Canada. A total of 16 million views were racked up.... The videos, by the way, weren’t illegal.... The Russians, who have now disappeared into thin air and are unlikely to ever be prosecuted, were accused of conspiring to violate foreign agent registration laws and commit money laundering (namely, routing money out of and back into the U.S. to commit unregistered foreign agent activities)....
"The indictment has had the remarkable effect of hammering everyone except its targets (though, maybe that was the point).... One, Lauren Southern, is also a Canadian influencer of the American right; another, Tim Pool, is the creator of the Timcast podcast. Both have since stated that they had full editorial control over the material they made, countering the notion that any Russians were telling them what to say. American prosecutors seem to agree. 'The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT (Russia Today) and the Russian government,' U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference last week.
"Very little direct propaganda appears to be made. Based on the indictment, Russian masters did ask for anti-Ukraine content after a concert hall near Moscow suffered an ISIS attack, in which around 150 people were killed. The rest appeared to be business-as-usual topics for the subcontracted creators: immigration, race politics, gender, the economy.... The videos didn’t really reach beyond the online American right, and if their influence operation worked anything like the way the Russian social media bot campaign did in 2016, they were narrow in effect and far eclipsed by genuine American media. It’s possible that the indictment, made in the weeks before the election, will have more influence over the public mind than any Tenet Media video ever could....
"[C]ommentators on the left have still pointed to the indictment as a means of discrediting the conservative ecosystem online. A CBC News investigation attacked Southern’s record of criticizing immigration. In the Star, Luke Lebrun of Press Progress wrote, 'millions of Canadians are regularly consuming content from these sources and that’s something we can’t ignore. It is bad for our democracy when a significant slice of our population is being deliberately misled and even radicalized.' Lebrun, looking for a deeper Canadian connection, even found a video in which Southern interviewed Counter Signal journalist Katrina Panova, known online as 'Kat Kanada,' who is not funded by Russia, to imply guilt by association. This prompted Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen to block Panova on the false basis of 'a foreign government paying you to engage with me'; he retracted the allegation of foreign funding afterward.
"There’s the other benefit of sponsoring propaganda overseas: you get discourse like this, painting a picture of a corrupted, misinformation-gorging horde threatening the enlightened half of society, worthy of being digitally quarantined. It can’t just be that high immigration, identity politics and the economic failures of progressive politicians are organically popular topics among the populace; no, it’s a Russian conspiracy.
"Meanwhile, as the U.S. indictment distracts, dust accumulates on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians’ (NSICOP) June report on foreign interference. China and India, too, have corrupted media members to some unknown degree (the Chinese government is alleged to have paid media outlets to publish articles; India is said to have an influence network that includes journalists). The public, unfortunately, remains in the dark as to who these figures are.
"Worse, some countries have tapped directly into our legislative houses. NSICOP has already discovered that some elected officials 'began wittingly assisting foreign state actors soon after their election.” India and China again are top suspects. Some Parliamentarians may have betrayed Canada, says NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, but their names never manage to escape from whisper networks to the general public. It will be an improvement when Canada finally gets its own foreign agent registry... But before we allow ourselves to be distracted by flashy U.S. Department of Justice badges, we have far greater, unresolved concerns in our halls of government."
Dangerous Foreign Agents? or Victims of Democrat Smear Campaign? | North West Cavalryman | September 9, 2024:
