A Canadian right-wing influencer vehemently denied claims she’d played a role in an alleged Russian propaganda scheme when testifying before a House of Commons committee on Thursday.
Lauren Southern insisted to MPs she’d been “deceived” by those who’d hired her and had total control over the videos she’d made. In any case, the media startup she worked for was a “total failure” that had struggled to gain views, she said.
Southern, who rose to online fame with sharp criticisms of immigration and Islam, was the first person associated with the plan to speak at length before the federal security committee, revealing new details about how she was recruited, how much she was paid and the content she’d produced.
The committee is currently probing the potential involvement of several Canadians in the alleged plot, which was laid out in a recent American indictment. In the document unsealed in September, U.S. officials claimed Russia had funnelled millions of dollars into a Tennessee-based digital startup that then paid a group of six well-known influencers for content that exacerbated social tensions or promoted the Russian view of the war in Ukraine.
Although Southern is believed to be one of those influencers, she is not facing charges and has denied wrongdoing. “I was surprised when the indictment dropped. I did not have knowledge of what was in the indictment,” she said in response to questioning from MPs.
“I can’t comment to how this all happened, because I was simply a contracted video creator,” she said. “I just made videos.”
The only people named in the indictment are the two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled outlet, who are facing charges. But the details about the media organization implicated match closely with an outlet called Tenet Media, which was founded by Canadian Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan. Until it was taken down, the website listed Southern as one of its “talent,” and she produced a stream of videos for the outlet on topics such as “the REAL truth about Project 2025” and Canada becoming a “COMMUNIST HELLHOLE.”
Southern said she had been recruited by Chen roughly four months before Tenet launched last November. The two women had moved in the same conservative YouTuber circles for years and had a “cordial” relationship, she said. Southern said she was paid $275,000 (U.S.) to produce three news videos a week, plus two mini-documentaries a month. That money was expected to cover any staff and travel costs, so she personally pocketed roughly $100,000 (Cdn.) for what she estimates were the more-than 80 videos she produced during her time with Tenet. She hasn’t spoken to Chen or Donovan since the allegations dropped, she said.
The paycheque seemed in line with a new startup, she said — she was told that someone in tech was backing the enterprise — so one of the “biggest surprises” when the indictment was unsealed was that some of her male U.S. counterparts were making far more money. (According to the indictment, one unnamed commentator was making $400,000 U.S. a month.)
Despite the big bucks, she said that by the standards of new media, Tenet struggled to get any real attention. On YouTube, its biggest platform, she says the outlet had “barely” over 300,000 subscribers. She said that her fellow commentator Dave Rubin — a well-known American YouTuber with millions of followers — “struggled to reach even reach hundreds of views” on his Tenet videos.
American authorities argue that Russia funded the videos in order to help inflame social tensions in the U.S., and to boost its preferred narrative on the war in Ukraine. It’s a claim that Southern strongly denies, saying she retained ultimate control of her content.
There is one unnamed female commentator mentioned in the indictment, which would seem to match with Southern, the only female commentator at Tenet. But the commentator is mentioned only briefly, in reference to the creation of a Discord channel in which the commentator allegedly discussed the editing of video with one of the RT employees. When questioned, Southern did say she sometimes had an editor provided, but still retained final say over the finished video.
“No one told me to have my views. No one forced me to have my opinions,” she said. “When we have these issues of mass immigration without integration, when we have these issues of so many foreign buyers coming into this country and inflating prices, when we have these issues of not putting the Canadian populace first, people want to hear these opinions.”
Members of the committee also pressed Southern on some of her more extreme decisions, including a 2018 trip to Russia that included an interview with Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin who has called for Ukraine to be annexed, and another trip the same year that saw her refused entry to the U.K.
In response, Southern referred to Dugin as an “interesting geopolitical figure” and said she’d been barred from Britain for trying to “set up a pride parade in Luton.” (According to the BBC, Southern had been previously seen displaying flyers reading “Allah is a gay god” in the town’s centre.)
Southern said she has not been asked to reimburse any of the money that she was paid. She has been visited by CSIS, who she said had been putting “immense psychological pressure” on her to provide them with more information. She said she declined. (The Star reached out to CSIS for comment but none was provided.)
Chen, the founder of Tenet, appeared before the committee earlier this month, but said only that as the subject of an American criminal investigation, she would not be answering questions. According to the committee, a summons has not been successfully served to Donovan.
