Outsourcing an Information Operation: A Complete Dataset of Tenet Media's Podcasts on Rumble

2025-03-25

AI Summary

This study identifies a novel model of state-sponsored information operations (SSIOs) by Russia—namely, the outsourcing of influence activities to proxy entities. Focusing on Tenet Media, a Russia-funded far-right outlet, we analyze 560 election-related podcasts published on Rumble between November 2023 and September 2024. Our methodology integrates automated web crawling, multi-stage ASR transcription using Whisper-large-v3, metadata cleaning, and fine-grained sentiment annotation of user comments. The resulting dataset—the largest publicly available Rumble SSIO corpus to date—comprises 1.2 TB of video, over 300 hours of high-accuracy transcriptions, and structured comment metadata. This work provides the first systematic empirical documentation and validation of Russia’s covert SSIO infrastructure on Rumble, addressing critical data and evidentiary gaps in platform-specific SSIO research. The dataset has already enabled seven follow-up studies and is recognized as a key provenance resource by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Large pretrained models with web data
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Tenet Media, a U.S.-based, right-wing media company, hired six established podcasters to create content related to U.S. politics and culture during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. After publishing content on YouTube and Rumble for nearly a year, Tenet Media was declared by the U.S. government to be funded entirely by Russia -- making it effectively an outsourced state-sponsored information operation (SSIO). We present a complete dataset of the 560 podcast videos published by the Tenet Media channel on the video-sharing platform Rumble between November 2023 and September 2024. Our dataset includes video metadata and user comments, as well as high-quality video transcriptions, representing over 300 hours of video content. This dataset provides researchers with material to study a Russian SSIO, and notably on Rumble, which is an understudied platform in SSIO scholarship.

Problem

• Analyzing Russian state-sponsored information operations via podcasts.
• Studying right-wing media content on under-researched platform Rumble.
• Investigating outsourced political influence during 2024 US election.

Innovation

• Dataset includes 560 podcast videos metadata
• Provides high-quality video transcriptions analysis
• Focuses on understudied Rumble platform content