Thank you for the question. It's good to see you as well.
This is a very good question. I don't think we're able to necessarily directly measure the impact of these narratives. You are right that Russian state media and its influencers on both the far left and the far right—it's important to note that they're on both sides of the political spectrum—target some of the most polarizing issues in society today. They target both sides of them, and they use influencers, proxy platforms and state media, like RT, to start tearing in both directions in order to pull apart the cohesion of our society.
These documents that I mentioned in this FBI affidavit—and I strongly recommend that every member of this committee look up the affidavit and look into the documents that are included there—clearly outline these objectives, and they're exactly consistent with what I was saying before. What these operators do is they look for those. They monitor our information space. They monitor social media for those specific subjects, and then they develop narratives in the Kremlin and with the organizations that work with them to attack those narratives. They've been effectively doing this.
I would say that in this affidavit I'm mentioning that is connected to the “Doppelganger” affair, one of the primary tactics there was to create fake news outlets. I think the impact of that was probably quite low, and I think we focused far too much on it. What we haven't focused on is the role that the influencers play in these campaigns.
That affidavit says that there were nearly 2,000 influencers in the western world who were used to amplify those narratives. I know that there are Canadian influencers as well, again on the far left and the far right, and we know from the Tenet Media indictment that there are clearly Canadians who are helping with the amplification of those narratives.
That's where the real threat is. We don't know what the impact is, but it is an important part of Russia's disinformation laundromat to clear out the Russian state fingerprints on them and to have those narratives amplified in our own ecosystem.
The final point I would make is that in a study that we did with Digital Public Square in 2023, we actually found that there were 200,000 accounts on Twitter that were actively promoting these narratives to Canadian audiences, and over 90% of them were far left and far right accounts, so in terms of impact, we do have that number.