Incident Update 4︱Discussion of and sentiment towards Canada on Tenet Media influencer podcasts
Authors: Sejal Davla, Nader Hedfi, and Aengus Bridgman, Media Ecosystem Observatory
Key takeaways:
Tenet Media influencers collectively produce thousands of podcast episodes that are consumed heavily in the United States and Canada. These podcasts often reference Canada, where 490 episodes (out of 1,952) aired since January 1, 2023 had a total of 1,115 distinct discussions related to Canada.
Regarding issues of interest to Russian operatives, Tenet Media influencers generally focus on discussions around conventional political actors (e.g. Trudeau, CBC, RCMP, etc.) along with issues of social justice and immigration.
Tenet Media influencers tend towards a high degree of negativity when discussing Canada and only rarely discuss anything positive about Canada. Notably, discussions about Canada in relation to immigration and social justice issues are overwhelmingly negative in tone.
The Tenet Media influencers collectively produce an enormous volume of long-form political discussion through their podcasts. In this incident update, we analyzed all podcast content from the three biggest Tenet Media influencers who have podcasts*, namely Tim Pool (Timcast IRL, Culture War, Daily Show), Dave Rubin (The Rubin Report), and Benny Johnson (The Benny Show). We collected, transcribed, and annotated 1,952 podcast episodes, from January 1, 2023 to September 19, 2024, extracting any mention of Canada, Canadian places, and politicians using keywords. Here, we describe the extent to which the five podcasts associated with these three influencers discuss Canada, what topics they focus on, and the overall sentiment towards Canada in their discussions.
*A previous version of this post indicated that the analysis was to all the podcasts produced by all Tenet Media influencers. Our analysis is actually limited to the three influencers with the largest audience.
How often is Canada discussed in these podcasts?
We first evaluate the extent to which the five podcasts discuss Canada, Canadian political figures or events, or Canadian institutions over the past two years. Figure 1 shows the frequency of segments related to Canada for the five podcasts, aggregated by month. While volume varies, this figure demonstrates how Canada is regularly mentioned and discussed by podcast hosts and guests. See Excerpt 1 from Tim Pool’s Culture War which mentions the favourable environment in Canada towards effective undercover journalism.
Figure 2 shows the percentage of all podcast episodes that have segments related to Canada, aggregated at the monthly level and disaggregated by podcast. Tim Pool’s Culture War referenced Canada the most frequently with 50% of the 70 episodes aired since January 1, 2023, including at least one mention of Canada. On the other hand, The Benny show had only 19% of episodes with any Canada-related mentions.
How do these podcasts discuss and invoke Canada?
We assess the extent to which Tenet Media personalities discuss Canada negatively or positively in their podcasts. We employ a LLM (Llama3.1:70b) to classify the sentiment as it relates to Canada. As shown in Figure 3, looking at the averages, we find that just shy of 50% of discussions mentioning Canada are negative, while only 16% are positive. While there is a large variability in the extent of negative sentiment between podcasts, the Rubin Report is overwhelmingly negative, with over 60% of the Canada-oriented discussions being negative. On the contrary, podcast segments with a positive tone were consistently low (10-20%) for each of the 5 podcasts. See Excerpt 2 from Dave Rubin's The Rubin Report podcast - this one is an example of a podcast excerpt we would label as negative about conventional political actors. Specifically, this podcast criticizes the Canadian Prime Minister and labels him as unqualified, a liar and pushing ‘authoritarian evil.’
What topics do the podcasts cover when discussing and invoking Canada?
The US Justice Department’s recent indictment of Russian-government sponsored actors details information on the strategy, objectives, and approach of the Russian influence operations. In this analysis, we took into consideration topics and sentiments belonging to eight categories that, according to the indictment, “should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Here, exploit refers to the clear objective of exacerbating the already-high level of political polarization in the United States, which is also on the rise in Canada. Using the eight categories of topics and sentiments (1), we identify five categories that apply to Canada:
Social justice
Discussion of conventional political actors and their controversies
The economy, inflation, and job loss
Immigration, migrants, refugees, etc.
Foreign spending and unjust and escalating wars
We assessed and classified all discussions of Canada into one of these topics where applicable, with the results shown in Figure 3 for all classified posts. Posts that did not apply to these topics were labeled as ‘Other/Unknown.’ See Excerpt 3 for an example from Tim Pool’s Timcast IRL which highlights violent crime in Canada. The post is classified as negative and about immigration. We find that the topics most commonly discussed in relation to Canada by the Tenet Media influencers relate to discussion of conventional political actors, typically Trudeau, the Liberal Party, CBC, the RCMP, etc. (at over 35%)—almost double compared to other topics of social justice (18%) and nearly triple that of immigration (12%).
While discussions related to Canada came in the context of several US and global issues, we also found episodes that heavily focused on Canada. One notable example is Timcast IRL episode #828 in July 2023 which has the highest number of segments discussing Canada (43). The episode description included “the sad downfall of Canada” and featured the popular Canadian Youtuber and former People’s Party of Canada candidate David Freiheit as a guest. The conversation was wide-ranging and included many of the categories of content identified in the DOJ indictment that “should be exploited”.
Issues of social justice and immigration were heavily discussed, with considerable criticism of conventional political actors. Specific discussion areas include:
Racism, cancel culture, and wokeness: As shown in Excerpt 4, the podcast begins with the claim that it is “madness in Canada.” There is a discussion about wokeness and how white people are affected with specific reference to the suicide of a school principal.
Medical assistance in dying: There is a discussion on Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) law (see Excerpt 5) in the context of declining economic conditions, especially affecting people that are homeless and/or affected by mental and chronic illnesses.
Replacement theory and eugenics: Discussion about Canadian assisted suicide policies and their impact on people dealing with mental and physical illnesses and homelessness, led to conversations about these measures being potential eugenics efforts and part of the conspiracy commonly called ‘replacement theory.’ This theory claims that (white) populations are being intentionally demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples in western countries.
Out-of-touch politicians: Quebec’s language bill (Bill 96) and the recent Avery’s Law in New Brunswick are discussed as examples of how Canadian lawmakers are not working towards solving important problems.
Criticism of the RCMP: One discussion focuses on a comparison between the Canadian trucker’s protest and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, including claims that RCMP officers are neo-nazis.
Government censorship: Discussion about Meta’s news ban, Quebec’s Bill 96, and Avery’s Law as a means for the Government to control content and other aspects of people’s lives.
How do the podcasts discuss these topics?
Combining our sentiment and topic classifications (Figures 3 and 4), we further categorized podcast discussions to identify which specific areas drew the most positive and negative attention. As anticipated above in the sentiment analysis section, we find that in the discussions topics of interest to the Russian operatives tend strongly towards negative sentiment, particularly towards Canada and its political leadership. As shown in Figure 5, the most negative topic is in relation to social justice, specifically to what the Russian operatives term “privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled”, but we describe here as efforts to advance social justice. Discussion of conventional political actors and immigration are also both negative in character - with over 50% of discussions being negative in character and only 10% being positive. Excerpt 5 highlights an example of a social justice and negative classification where the discussion highlights and criticizes the Canadian government approach to both gender affirmation surgery and medical assistance in dying.
While Canada may not be the explicit target of the Tenet Media influencer operation, the influencers frequently invoke Canada on their podcasts to discuss topics and sentiments aligned with Russian operatives' interests. Discussions that invoke Canada, when they are positive are negative, almost always characterizing Canada and Canadian institutions, politicians, and policies in a negative light. Canada is regularly depicted as an example of what can go wrong—particularly concerning social justice and immigration—and is used as a cautionary tale.
Tenet Media influencers evaluated here have all claimed no knowledge of or influence from the RT influence operation (Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson). Nevertheless, this analysis demonstrates that the podcast content produced by these influencers consistently is negative in tone and covers topics and sentiments aligned with Russian operative interests.
For Canadians who regularly consume content from these influencers, we urge caution and advise that you ensure that the political content you are regularly consuming, whether from Canadian or international sources, is providing you with a rich and nuanced picture of Canada.
Note that this analysis has focused on Canadian content and interest. As with all our data, we are happy to provide full transcripts of all podcasts to other researchers that seek to better understand the information ecosystem. Get in touch!
Methodology
We first collected all podcasts produced by Tenet Media personalities: Timcast IRL, Tim Pool Daily Show, Tim Pool Culture War, The Rubin Report, and The Benny Show, with a total of 1,952 podcast episodes from January 1, 2023 to September 19, 2024. We then used OpenAI’s whisper-base-en32 to transcribe the text of all the podcasts. Using a dictionary, we identified segments of the transcription that discussed Canada and found that 490 episodes discussed Canada at least once. We then captured the context of the discussion using 250-character limits on either side of the key term identifying the discussion focused on Canada. We extended these windows if Canadian terms were repeated within the window and also extended the window to capture complete sentences. This yielded a dataset of 1,115 distinct discussions of Canada.
We then used Llama3.1:70b to classify the sentiment towards Canada of the using the following prompt:
We also asked Llama3.1:70b to separately identify the core topic of the discussion using the following prompt:
Footnotes
(1) From the DOJ indictment of September 4, 2024: 1) Encroaching universal poverty. Record inflation. Halting of economic growth. Unaffordable prices for food and essential goods; 2) Risk of job loss for white Americans; 3) Privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled; 4) Constant lies of the U.S. Political Party B administration about the real situation in the country; 5) Threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants (including new immigrants from Ukraine); 6) Overspending on foreign policy and at the expense of interests of white US citizens; 7) Constant lies to the voters by U.S. Political Party B in power; 8) Last but not least - America is suffering a defeat despite Candidate B efforts. We are being drawn into the war. Our guys will die in Ukraine.