Incident Update 5︱A survey analysis of awareness and importance of Tenet Media influencers in Canada
Authors: Chris Ross, Jennie Philips, Blake Lee-Whiting, Aengus Bridgman, Media Ecosystem Observatory
Key takeaways:
Approximately one quarter of Canadians are aware of the incident or recognize any of the Tenet Media influencers, with highest awareness among men, politically interested people and X/Twitter and YouTube users. Conservatives are the least aware in comparison to Liberals and NDP party affiliates.
Respondents felt that this incident is to the greatest benefit of Russia (66%) and Donald Trump (55%). Few Canadians judge that either Justin Trudeau (8%) or Pierre Poilievre (15%) benefit.
Canadians are strongly in favour of action by government and social media companies. Generally, they are interested in increased transparency, removal of offending accounts, and an RCMP investigation of any implicated Canadians.
As part of our ongoing response to the Russia Tenet Media case (see here for the story and timeline), we assess Canadians' awareness of and attitudes towards the incident. Specifically, we ask:
How aware are Canadians of this incident? And of the Tenet Media influencers?
Is this threat an effective tool to mislead Canadians and how much of a threat is it to future elections?
What are the associated beliefs about the incident, i.e. who benefits most?
How do Canadians feel social media companies and the government should respond?
To answer these questions, we conducted a survey to a nationally representative set of Canadians and analyzed their responses. All findings are weighted to age, gender and region.
Exposure to the Incident
How aware are Canadians of the incident?
Figure 1 below shows awareness of the incident, which we referred to as ‘Russian funding of political influencers through Tenet Media’ in the survey question phrasing. We assessed general awareness of the incident as well as analyzed further by specific demographics including gender, age, political interest, as well as social media use including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X/Twitter.
Figure 1. Percentage of Canadians aware of the incident by demographics and social media use
Overall, a quarter of Canadians (25%) expressed familiarity with the news story relating to this incident. Of the different demographics and attitudes we looked at, men, politically interested individuals, older people, NDP partisans, and users of YouTube and X/Twitter were more likely to claim awareness of the incident. Men were twice as likely to have heard of the story, and those with high political interest more than three times as likely as those with low political interest.
How aware are Canadians of the influencers?
While many Canadians had heard about the incident, they may not be necessarily directly familiar with the influencers themselves. To better understand the audiences of the influencers involved in the incident, we evaluated how many Canadians simply recognized the influencers. We provided an image of four influencers involved (see Figure 2), and asked survey respondents if they knew who they were. If the respondent indicated “yes” to a photo, we then verified this knowledge by asking the respondent to select their name from four options.
Figure 2. Four most well-known Tenet Media influencers (from left to right: Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin)
Figure 3 shows the percent of respondents who were able to correctly identify at least one Tenet Media influencer, broken down by the demographic and social media usage categories identified above. While many of the demographic trends align with the awareness of the incident plot above, there are some interesting differences. Men, politically interested people, and users of Twitter and YouTube were also more aware of these influencers - similar to awareness of the incident. However, there are no clear partisan differences in influencer awareness. Moreover, older Canadians (55+) are half as likely to recognize one of the influencers as they are to have heard about the Tenet Media story. Conversely, younger Canadians are more likely to recognize the influencers than to have heard about Russian funding Tenet Media. Those consuming content from these influencers may be less aware of their ties to the Russian government (given their low familiarity with the case). Not shown in the Figure, Tim Pool was the most recognizable to Canadians with 10%, followed by Dave Rubin at 7%, Lauren Southern at 6%, and only 4% for Benny Johnson.
Figure 3. Percentage of Canadians aware of the incident by demographics and social media use
Threat Assessment
Is this threat an effective tool to mislead Canadians and how much of a threat is it to future elections?
We assess the extent Canadians perceive the incident to be a threat. In the context of this Russian case, we assessed perceived threat as it relates to Canadian elections. Beyond questions asked in our response survey, we situate threat perception among other measures from our monthly situation reports, generative AI and foreign influence. We also included the option to rate the use of fake social media accounts engaging in political content (below labeled as ‘Political Bots’) in reference to bot activity on social media platforms.
Figure 4 shows that Canadians who were unaware of the Tenet Media incident (prior to taking the survey) rank it as less concerning than the other challenges (6.1/10). However, those who were previously aware of the incident rank it as concerning as challenges like Political Bots, Generative AI, and Foreign Influence more generally.
Figure 4. Level of concern about perceived threats to elections
Interpretations
What are the associated beliefs about the incident, i.e. who benefits most?
To gauge who Canadians believe stood to benefit from the incident, we asked which political leaders and countries would benefit had the incident not been uncovered. Figure 5 shows the distribution of Canadian perceptions of who benefits the most. Overall, the most perceived beneficiary of this incident is Russia (66%), closely followed by Donald Trump (55%). The rest of the options (Pierre Poillievre, The United States, Justin Trudeau, Kamala Harris, and Canada) did not break 15%.
Figure 5. Percentage of Canadians perceptions of benefit by political leaders and countries
Response
How should social media companies and the Canadian government respond?
Finally, we evaluate Canadians’ support for potential responses to the incident by social media companies and the Canadian government. Figure 6 shows potential responses ordered by how many Canadians support them. We asked about the following potential social media responses: increasing transparency of the event, removing implicated accounts, providing data for researchers, and the company CEO to personally update on the matter; and the following potential Canadian government responses: transparency reports, investigation by the RCMP, forced removal of accounts, researcher access to data, task force investigation, and a military investigation.
Canadians feel social media companies are slightly more responsible to act. Approximately two-thirds of respondents think social media companies should increase transparency around the event and remove accounts implicated in the incident (66% and 63%). For preferred government responses, nearly two-thirds of respondents think requiring transparency reports from social media companies is an appropriate response (60%). Approximately half of respondents support an RCMP investigation and forcing the removal of implicated accounts (55% and 50%). While allowing better data access for researchers to analyze the incident would greatly help the public and policy-makers better understand the event, only 30% of respondents support increased transparency by social media companies and 26% support the Canadian government requiring social media companies to provide platform data.
Figure 6. Percentages of Canadian perceptions of social media company response tactics
Conclusion
As we continue to characterize the impact of this incident, this update finds that overall engagement with the story was moderately low, and awareness of the influencers involved was low as well. Our findings do, however, demonstrate an interesting phenomenon — many of those familiar with the incident were not familiar with the influencers, and, conversely, many familiar with the influencers did not know about the incident. This finding, a common phenomena associated with mis and disinformation, demonstrates a disconnect in information pathways between the sources uncovering these types of incidents and the audience that is most in need of the information. This demonstrates a critical vulnerability in our information ecosystem and suggests value in rethinking the mechanisms we use to inform the general public about foreign influence and interference events.
Footnotes
(1) Data for this report includes survey responses from 1220 Canadian adults conducted from September 25th to 30th using a commercial survey panel provider. The margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is +/-2.59%, 19 times out of 20.