Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be back before the Canadian Parliament. I spent several years living in Canada and have a great deal of respect for the work you do.

I am the CEO of Reset Tech. We're a global non-profit that works to support research, policy development and public attention focused on fighting digital threats to democracy, including the kinds of Russian information operations targeting democratic states that we're here to talk about today.

I have done quite a bit of work with my team in looking at the case of Tenet Media, which has sparked this hearing, so I want to talk a bit about what Tenet Media looks like.

I think all members of the committee are likely familiar with the details of this case, but just to recap, this was revealed in a sweeping indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice back in September, just over a month ago. It indicated that a company based in Tennessee but, importantly, is a subsidiary of a Montreal-based company run by two Canadians—Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan—was paid $10 million by the Russians to subsidize the production of video and social media content that was distributed over all of the major social media platforms. This was done by the two of them, as well as a set of six other influencers, including Lauren Southern, who is another prominent Canadian social media influencer.

It's notable that a lot of the media attention has described this activity as being focused on the U.S. market, but it's really important to note how much of the content had a Canadian focus, and how many Russian information operations we have observed over the years have not distinguished much between an American audience and a Canadian audience. Russian tactics, as the professor's comments clearly illustrate, are intended to divide and to destabilize with disinforming and conspiratorial narratives, and that's certainly true as for Canada as it is for the U.S.

I want to highlight here for you in my opening remarks some of the evidence we have uncovered in our forensic work to look at what Tenet Media did with its $10 million in Russian funding.

First, all of these accounts that Tenet was subsidizing across all social media platforms had a total subscriber base of about 16 million, which is quite large. What does that mean in terms of total audience? Over the course of the last year, we were able to see Tenet media channels on Twitter alone get 20 billion impressions. I'll repeat that. They had 20 billion impressions on Twitter alone over the course of the last year. Add to that an additional 1.1 billion video views across YouTube, TikTok and Rumble, and the creation of a podcast, The Rubin Report, which is consistently ranked in the top 0.01% of podcasts in the world.

This is a very successful social media influencer campaign that has a variety of important features, not least of which is something the researcher community has called “the Elon effect”. This essentially means tweeting at Elon Musk, who has a giant social media presence on X, formerly Twitter, to try to get him to retweet or amplify posts. He amplified Tenet Media posts 70 times over the course of the last year, dramatically increasing the audience for this content.

What does this mean? How is this relevant for us in evaluating the threat level posed by the Kremlin in information operations?

I think we need to be very concerned. The Kremlin is innovating. It used to buy Facebook ads. It used to do little bits and pieces of influence campaigns. I'm happy to talk about some of the others that we've seen over the years in the question and answer part of this hearing, but for now, I think it's important to note that $10 million for 20 billion impressions is extraordinary value for money. It means we can fully expect to see more attacks of this kind if we don't already have them in the marketplace today.

This one was discovered only because of FBI signals intelligence intercepts on the Russians, who were supplying the funding to Tenet Media. It's very difficult to detect. It's important to call out the fact that the Silicon Valley companies that run these platforms, with all of their money and talent, do not seem to have any kind of defences in place to protect against this kind of dark money payola that's using social media channels to secretly influence public opinion in both Canada and the United States.

It's an urgent issue. It is critical that this inquiry is happening and that Canadian forces in law enforcement and national security pay close attention and develop defensive measures.

Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to the questions.