Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

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

Laura Kurek, Kevin Zheng, Eric Gilbert, Ceren Budak

TL;DR

This work provides a complete, machine-readable dataset of 560 Tenet Media podcast videos published on Rumble from November 2023 to September 2024, totaling over 302 hours and including metadata, user comments, and high-quality transcripts produced with Whisper large-v2. The authors describe a reproducible data pipeline (scraping, transcription, post-processing) and release the data under FAIR-aligned, non-commercial licensing on Zenodo, enabling analysis of a state-sponsored information operation on a video platform. Preliminary analyses reveal a focus on U.S. national politics and the 2024 election, with narrative tendencies around right-wing cultural issues, and quantify audience engagement and content descriptors. The dataset addresses a gap in SSIO research by studying paid content creators rather than fake accounts and highlights Rumble as a nascent but important platform for studying foreign influence operations.

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.

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

TL;DR

This work provides a complete, machine-readable dataset of 560 Tenet Media podcast videos published on Rumble from November 2023 to September 2024, totaling over 302 hours and including metadata, user comments, and high-quality transcripts produced with Whisper large-v2. The authors describe a reproducible data pipeline (scraping, transcription, post-processing) and release the data under FAIR-aligned, non-commercial licensing on Zenodo, enabling analysis of a state-sponsored information operation on a video platform. Preliminary analyses reveal a focus on U.S. national politics and the 2024 election, with narrative tendencies around right-wing cultural issues, and quantify audience engagement and content descriptors. The dataset addresses a gap in SSIO research by studying paid content creators rather than fake accounts and highlights Rumble as a nascent but important platform for studying foreign influence operations.

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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 20 sections, 2 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. State-sponsored information operations
  4. Podcasts
  5. Rumble
  6. Data Collection
  7. Dataset Curation
  8. Metadata
  9. Transcription
  10. Post-Processing of Transcripts
  11. Content Warning
  12. Data Release & FAIR Guiding Principles
  13. Preliminary Analysis
  14. Conclusion
  15. Limitations
  16. ...and 5 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Distribution of user engagement and video duration for each of the Tenet Media podcast hosts.
  • Figure 2: Tenet media videos with top user engagement: a) most viewed video, b) most commented on video, c) most upvoted video, and d) most downvoted video.