I Watched Over 100 Covert Russian Propaganda Videos On YouTube — Here’s What I Saw
The videos encouraged African Americans to stock up on guns and stay home on election day — and that was just the beginning.
“My advice to Black people is not to go out and vote. The best thing you can do is stay home [on election day].”
This was what video bloggers Williams and Kalvin Johnson told viewers on their YouTube page on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016 — the day of the presidential election. Claiming to be from Atlanta, the duo, who call themselves “Williams and Kalvin,” tried to convince African American voters that there was no point in voting and it didn’t matter who won the election. The best way to make your voice heard, they said, was to boycott the election.
“We don’t have any other choice this time but boycott the election. Don’t go to vote. Only this way we can change the way of things.”
As you’ve probably figured out by now, Williams and Kalvin are not really video bloggers from Atlanta — they’re paid propagandists working for the Kremlin.
The Daily Beast first reported on the YouTube “stars” in another stunning exposé published Sunday night, less than two weeks after their explosive report detailing how Russians stole the identity of a U.S. Muslim organization in an attempt to smear Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
According to The Daily Beast, investigators have identified the social media pages of Williams and Kalvin as part of the Russian effort to influence U.S. politics and, more broadly, to infiltrate and divide American society. The duo’s content was pulled from Facebook and Twitter in August after it was identified as Russian government-backed propaganda, but their YouTube videos remained live through mid-October.
While their YouTube account was taken down Monday, I managed to watch over 100 videos produced by Williams and Kalvin before they were removed. What I saw was a deeply disturbing (albeit poorly executed) effort to demoralize African American voters and exploit existing racial tensions in America with inflammatory — sometimes extremist — anti-government messages, graphic imagery, and a targeted smear campaign against Hillary Clinton, among other things.
The videos provide new insight into the ongoing Russian influence campaign, which, as we now know, was not limited to ‘fake news’ and hacked emails, but also extended to real life events including anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim rallies and pro-Trump flash mobs organized by Russian government-backed groups. The production value of the videos was poor and their attempt to reach out to African Americans was clumsy and awkward, but the methods of deception and manipulation they deployed were sophisticated and revealing.
The sheer volume of content in the videos is too much to condense into one article, so I’m breaking it up into a series of articles that will explore different aspects of the Russian propaganda campaign. This article presents a timeline of the YouTube videos, with a focus on election-related content. The timeline also explores other media coverage that mirrored the content of the Russian-backed YouTube videos.
A Timeline of Russian Propaganda
The first video on the YouTube page of Williams and Kalvin was posted on July 19, 2016 —the same day Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Like many of their videos, this one did not explicitly reference the 2016 election; rather, it pushed a conspiracy theory about a recent event dominating national headlines at the time (an ambush-style shooting that left five police officers dead in Dallas, TX on July 7, 2016).
The duo continued to upload new videos to their YouTube page through at least March of this year, producing 116 videos in that timespan. The videos were short — most lasted only 2–3 minutes — and the vast majority focused on issues related to race, racism, and policing. Some of the messages were aimed at demoralizing African Americans, often encouraging them to give up on making things better because white Americans would never care about them. This included messages telling African Americans not to care about politics because white politicians couldn’t solve their problems. Most of the videos did not explicitly mention the 2016 election; rather, they sought to divide and destabilize American society by exploiting existing racial tensions and using America’s legacy of racism to promote anti-American and anti-government sentiment.
Notably, the first nine videos they produced were devoted to two topics:
- The shooting deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland, all of whom were killed by police officers.
- The July 2016 shooting deaths of police officers in Dallas, TX, and Baton Rouge, LA, which took place in the midst of protests sparked by the police killings of Castile and Sterling.
Below, I have posted screenshots of all 116 videos on the YouTube page of Williams and Kalvin. The videos are numbered in reverse chronological order, so the 1st video (“The truth about white supremacy) is the most recent, and the 116th video (“Dallas Shooting Conspiracy”) is the oldest. As you can see, the videos covered quite a range of issues, but all were tied to race and racism in America.
July 2016: DNC Protests
The first time Williams and Kalvin explicitly mentioned Hillary Clinton was in their tenth video (#107), which was posted to their YouTube page in July 2016. The video, titled “‘WE WON’T VOTE FOR CLINTON’ DEMONSTRATION,” referenced the anti-Hillary Clinton protests that took place the last week of July at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Here’s what The Daily Beast reported about the protests on July 25, 2016:
The demonstrators, many of them sporting “Bernie 2016” shirts and other Sanders campaign swag, varied their chants as they marched. Their message, however, remained uniform: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should never be president because they are both a part of the same corrupt and rigged political system that has created such anger among those on the left and right.
Here’s what the Washington Times reported on July 26, 2016:
As several hundred Black Lives Matters protesters marched through the city toward the convention at the Wells Fargo Center, the crowd chanted, “Hell no, DNC/We won’t vote for Hillary!”
White activists outnumbered black ones in the Black Lives Matter demonstration. But young black men and women in the crowd said they weren’t voting for Mrs. Clinton. Many said they would back Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
And here’s what CBS reported on July 24, 2016:
Throngs of Bernie Sanders supporters marched down a main thoroughfare to show their support of him and disdain for Hillary Clinton ahead of the convention.
Chanting “Hell No, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary” and “This is what democracy looks like,” the marchers headed from City Hall down Broad Street, the main north-south artery that leads from the city center to the convention site about 4 miles away.
Though planned for months, Sunday’s marches came as fractures appeared in the party that had been trying to display a show of unity in recent weeks. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned Sunday as Democratic Party chair over an email suggesting the DNC had played favorites for Clinton during the primary. It was a stunning leadership shakeup as party officials gather in Philadelphia to nominate Clinton.
The Democrats had been trying to avoid the divide that was apparent in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention last week. But the hacked emails, published by Wikileaks, further fired up Sanders supporters, who long accused the party of favoring Clinton despite officially being neutral.
While the protests at the DNC were covered by the mainstream media, right-wing media devoted wall-to-wall coverage of the protests. During the last week of July, Breitbart News’ Twitter feed barely mentioned any issues other than the DNC protests (for example, see: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
In addition to right-wing media, Russian propaganda outlet RT.com was also aggressively pushing stories about the DNC protests.
August 2016: Clinton Cash
Williams and Kalvin mentioned Hillary Clinton again in their 12th video (“‘CLINTON CASH’ SAYS IT ALL”), which was released just after their video about the DNC protests.
Clinton Cash was essentially a high-priced smear campaign against Hillary Clinton. The book got most of its funding from the Mercer family, who were also among Trump’s top donors. The billionaire family is also a major backer of the data firm Cambridge Analytica and helped fund Breitbart News under Steve Bannon’s leadership. Bannon would later go on to produce a film version of the book on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, just before he joined the Trump campaign. The film was specifically edited to appeal to angry supporters of Bernie Sanders. As Nancy LeTourneau reported in Washington Monthly, the book and subsequent film were a huge part of the Trump campaign’s orchestrated effort to undermine Hillary Clinton through the dissemination of weaponized information and disinformation.
In the video on William and Kalvin’s YouTube page, the host begins by stating, “I support Bernie Sanders,” and then goes on to endorse the movie Clinton Cash.
Around the same time that Williams and Kalvin were endorsing Clinton Cash on their Russian-backed YouTube page, Breitbart news was doing the same (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example).
On July 24, 2016, Breitbart tweeted that Clinton Cash was trending #1 on Facebook and that “Sanders supporters played a huge role in boosting the online premiere of #ClintonCash.”
August 2016: “KKK is for Hillary. This is the reason we should vote for Trump.”
In August, Williams and Kalvin ramped up their attacks on Hillary Clinton and explicitly expressed support for Trump. In many of these videos, the YouTubers invoked race and racism in an attempt to galvanize African Americans in opposition to Clinton.
On August 30, the duo posted a video called “Dr. Alveda against fu**in Hillary,” in which they referenced Martin Luther King’s niece in an appeal to get African American voters to support Trump. The caption on the video implored African Americans to “take [Alveda King’s] opinion as a proved point of view”:
Dr. Alveda King is a really honest and well-educated woman. Moreover, she is Martin Luther King’s niece. These facts make us trust this woman and take her opinion as a proved point of view. And if she says that we can’t trust Democrats and must rely only on Republican party we have to do this no matter if we want it or not. We must be brave and face the reality.
In the video, Williams and Kalvin invoked the oft-repeated myth that the KKK supports Hillary Clinton and “hates Donald Trump.”
“There is no time for Democrats because Democrats are for Hillary and KKK is for Hillary. This is the reason we should vote for Trump,” they said. “My vote is for Trump… I could never vote for old bitch Hillary.”
August 2016: “This is time for change. Let our vote go for Trump.”
On August 31, the day after they posted the video about Alveda King, Williams and Kalvin uploaded a very similar video titled “Quanell X for Trump,” which claimed that the leader of the New Black Panther Party had endorsed Donald Trump for president. The video’s caption said Democrats had failed African Americans and should give Trump a chance:
Quanell X is a leader of New Black Panther Party endorsed Donald Trump and proved his point with the undisputable arguments. We have been voting for Democrats since we had equal voting rights, but our living is getting worse and worse. So, maybe we need to change our minds and use our own brains but not CNN reports?
In the video, Williams and Kalvin said Trump couldn’t be a racist because he’s a businessman, and urged their viewers to support him, not Democrats.
“You should not vote for Democrats,” they said. “This is time for change. Let our vote go for Trump,” they said.
Three days prior to that, Breitbart News posted an article making nearly the exact same argument:
The thing is, Quanell X never endorsed Trump. He did criticize the Democratic Party, but when asked in an August 26, 2016, interview if he supported Trump, Quanell unequivocally said no:
“Saying that Quanell X is voting for Donald Trump could not be further from the truth as Satan is from God. There’s no way I’d vote for Donald Trump when, at his heart, he cares nothing for black people. He [Trump] has affiliations with white supremacy groups. How the hell could I support that man?”
The claim that Quanell X had endorsed Trump exemplifies one of the most common tactics in Russia’s arsenal of active measures. As described in a 2016 report in the Estonian Journal of Military Studies, Kremlin propaganda is effective in part because it starts with a true story, then mixes in just enough fiction to turn the story into targeted disinformation aimed at achieving a specific goal:
To make sure that fake news stories are taken at face value by the intended audiences, the publisher will create a composite story that is not completely false but rather combines some factual information with complete fiction. This mixture of actual facts and mistruths, together with some irrelevant details to make ‘news’ looking more realistic, creates stories from an alternative reality that aligns with the overarching goals of the Kremlin
September 2016: “White Lives Don’t Matter” and “All Cops Are Drug Dealers”
Williams and Kalvin were less active in September 2016, posting just a handful of videos to YouTube. Most of the videos during this time period included inflammatory content about race, racism, and policing, in what seemed like an effort to both inflame racial tensions and give racists a reason to demonize African Americans.
October 2016: “The truth about old racist b*tch”
The attacks on Hillary Clinton peaked in October 2016, starting with an October 12th video titled “The truth about old racist b*tch.” Notably, in the caption of the video (and in the video itself), Williams and Kalvin mention WikiLeaks, which at the time was releasing weaponized information obtained from hacked emails:
WikiLeaks this weekend is causing Clinton to get nervous. They published her E-mails where she is explaining that some nations are good and others are bad. This is as racist as only it can be. Yep, Clinton is a racist, but she looks down on all Americans. Everyone who is voting for Hillary is a racist too!
In the video, the host angrily says: “F*ck Hillary, I know that she is a racist b*tch…This woman is very very deadly. She’s evil; she’s an old witch.”
Again mentioning WikiLeaks, the host claims Clinton is a serial killer who wants to murder Julian Assange: “She wants to kill Julian Assange for what, for telling the truth?”
The same day, former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone was also promoting WikiLeaks:
The claim that Hillary Clinton was cozying up with a klansman was a popular smear that made the rounds among Trump supporters. The tweet below, posted about 3 weeks after the Russian-backed YouTube video, includes the exact same image that was featured in the video. Overlap between Russian propaganda and pro-Trump content was common in the months leading up to the election.
October 2016: “A word of truth about a rapist’s wife”
On October 14, Williams and Kalvin posted another inflammatory video about Hillary Clinton, referring to her as a “a rapist’s wife.”
In the video, the host sat in front of a picture of a t-shirt with Bill Clinton’s face and the word “RAPE” emblazoned on it, as seen above. Around the same time, Roger Stone was selling that exact same t-shirt on his website:
Curiously, the caption of the Oct. 14th video is seemingly unrelated to the content:
Why is Hillary’s security assaulting black people at her rallies? #BlackLivesMatter. Clinton talks about Trump “insulting African-Americans” while one is physically ejected from her event. She then encourages her supporters to “follow” the man.
When I did a Google search for ‘African American ejected from Hillary Clinton rally,’ one of the first articles that popped up in the search results was an Infowars article from October 10, 2016. The phrasing might look a little familiar — because it’s exactly the same as the caption on the Williams and Kalvin YouTube video:
October 2016: “A word of truth about Danney Williams”
Also on October 14, Williams and Kalvin posted a video pushing a conspiracy theory about Bill Clinton fathering a child named Danney Williams. The caption of the video discussed the unfounded rumor as truth:
Danney Williams, 30, has been trying since at least 1999 to be acknowledged as the out-of-wedlock son of former President Bill Clinton and a black prostitute in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In the video, the host links this rumor to Hillary Clinton, saying: “I never believed that Hillary didn’t know what was going on.”
“Bill and Hillary look like a bunch of serial killers and now they are about to rape this nation,” he added.
Around the same time, Roger Stone was pushing similar conspiracy theories about Danney Williams on a near daily basis:
November 2016: “Don’t vote for Hillary Clinton — she’s a f*cking racist b*tch”
On November 7, 2016 — the day before the election — Williams and Kalvin posted a video titled “The truth about elections,” in which they called Hillary Clinton a “f*cking racist b*tch” and implored African Americans to “stand together and say ‘Hillary Clinton is not our candidate.’”
The video opens with the host saying: “Today is going to be one of the worst elections because we have one of the worst candidates: Hillary Clinton.”
He continues:
“Don’t vote for Hillary Clinton. She’s a f*cking racist b*tch. She’s not our candidate. She doesn’t care about us. She doesn’t care about any of us. She’s funded by the Muslims; she only cares about the Muslims…
Black people stand together and say Hillary Clinton isn’t our candidate…
If you vote for her, you take responsibility for all of her crimes.”
November 2016 (Election Day): “We don’t have any other choice this time but to boycott the election”
On November 8, 2016, Williams and Kalvin posted one of their most disturbing videos. Titled “U.S. presidential election 2016,” the video called on African Americans to boycott the election, saying the best way to make your voice heard is to stay at home.
The caption of the video told viewers they had no choice but to boycott the election:
Power to the People! We have to grow up, we have to wise up. We don’t have any other choice this time but boycott the election. This time we choose between two racists. No one represents Black people. Don’t go to vote. Only this way we can change the way of things.
Williams and Kalvin delivered a similar message in the video, telling African Americans that neither candidate will benefit them, and encouraging people to stay at home on election day.
“My advice to black people — not go out and vote because we are not going to benefit,” the host said. “It doesn’t matter who you are going to vote for… Black guys are not going to get anything from these two people.”
At one point in the video, the host even told viewers that if they do vote, they’ll regret it later and wish they hadn’t voted.
“Black people the best thing to do is to stay at home,” he said. “I think the best thing to do is not to vote.”
November 2016 (Election Day): “First they will take our weapons; then they will come to our homes and then…they will kill us.”
In another video posted on election day, Williams and Kalvin delivered a sinister message about a U.S. government plan to use gun control to kill African Americans and/or force African Americans back into slavery.
The caption for the video, titled “The truth about Second Amendment,” warned viewers that anyone trying to take their guns away was trying to take their freedom and then their life.
In the video, Williams and Kalvin said liberals and Democrats “want Blacks to be slaves again.”
“First they will take our weapons; then they will come to our homes and tell us to leave; then they will kill us,” the host said.
November 2016 (Election Day): “All white Americans hate Blacks.”
In a third video posted on election day, Williams and Kalvin delivered an inflammatory message aimed at dividing the nation and demoralizing African American voters.
November 2016: “The election is over and we don’t give a f*ck. We didn’t vote for them because none of them is our comrade.”
On November 14, Williams and Kalvin posted a video titled “The truth about the most important elections,” in which they first claimed that the election outcome didn’t matter to African Americans, then said African Americans had “won the election because [African Americans] like marijuana.”
“The election is over and we don’t give a f*ck,” the host said. “We didn’t vote for them [Clinton or Trump] because none of them is our comrade.”
The video’s caption said “there was nothing more important on the 8th of November than the voting for the marijuana legalization.”
“All we care about is marijuana. Five states legalized marijuana,” the host said. “Black people won the election because we like marijuana.”
November 2016: “America is the most racist country in Earth.”
The next several videos used America’s dark legacy of racism in an attempt to invoke apathy among African Americans and promote anti-American and anti-government sentiment.
On November 15, Williams and Kalvin posted a video titled “The truth about racism in America,” in which they told viewers that “America is the most racist country on earth” and that no president would ever change that.
November 2016: “The election is over. Trump is our president, whether you like it or not.”
On November 16, Williams and Kalvin posted a video titled “The truth about black and white problems.” The caption for the video told viewers that the election outcome didn’t matter because no white president could help solve problems in the African American community.
The video opened with the host saying: “The election is over and the one that’s won is the people’s choice. Trump is our president, whether you like it or not.”
He continued, telling viewers that African Americans would lose regardless of who won the election:
Black people will lose anywhere; don’t let them fool you…Either way, they can’t help us; so we don’t care who is in the White House.
November 2016: “Black America is not into politics” and “White people don’t give a f*ck about black problems”
In a Nov. 16th video titled “The Truth about if blacks should care about white politics,” Williams and Kalvin told African Americans that they shouldn’t care about politics because it’s a white person’s game:
Black America is not into politics. This is not our game and we don’t want to play with whites. You know why? Because I don’t give a f*ck about it! I really don’t care and I don’t know why any black American should care anyhow.
Two days later, the duo posted a video called “The truth about f**in racist Americans,” in which they cited a recent incident of racist intimidation at the University of Pennsylvania to make the argument that “America will always be a racist country.”
“White people don’t give a fuck about black problems,” the host said.
Later in the video, he predicted that a race war was inevitable.
December 2016: “[M]ost of black folks ignored the elections and this was the best way to express what black Americans really think.”
On December 16, Williams and Kalvin posted a video titled “The truth about black votes,” in which they claimed that ignoring the election was “the best way to express what black Americans really think.”
“I didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton,” the host said. He went on to say that he was disappointed in President Obama and told viewers that “a lot of black people voted for Trump.”
That’s just not true. Almost 90% of the Black vote went for Hillary Clinton, compared to 8% for Trump. In fact, Trump won the presidency with less support from minority voters than any president in at least 40 years. What is true is that the day before this video was released, Trump thanked African American voters for staying home on election day.
Voter Suppression: A Link to the Trump Campaign?
The common thread that ties these videos together is their intent: To demoralize African American voters and encourage them to stay home on election day.
As Think Progress reported in October 2016, the Trump campaign was engaged in a similar effort during the same time period:
Senior Trump campaign officials told Bloomberg News they are using targeted radio spots, social media posts, and campaign events in neighborhoods of color to push messages they think will discourage voting in those demographics. Namely, they hope that invoking the machinations described in the Clinton campaigns leaked e-mails will turn off progressives, that dredging up decades-old sexual assault accusations against Bill Clinton will turn off women, and reminders that Hillary Clinton referred to some black teenagers as “superpredators” in the 1990s will turn off African Americans.
The latter strategy, reportedly led by Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, is “a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls — particularly in Florida.” The campaign is planning a barrage of Facebook “dark posts” with the “superpredators” message targeted at likely Clinton voters.
Rather than attempting to win their votes for Donald Trump, the campaign hopes these voters will not vote all.
Recently, we’ve learned a lot more about Russia’s efforts to suppress voters, particularly African Americans.
Senator Mark Warner, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said in May 2017 that he’d seen evidence suggesting that women and African American voters in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin were targeted with “fake news” aimed at suppressing their votes.
The same month, the Guardian published a report describing the voter suppression tactics designed and deployed by Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked on voter targeting for the Trump campaign:
Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.
CNN reported in late September 2017 that some of the Russian-bought Facebook ads referenced Black Lives Matter and were specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore. Shortly thereafter, CNN reported that a number of the Russian-linked ads targeted specific demographic groups in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin — two states where Trump won by less than 1% of the vote. According to the report, “the ads were aimed at suppressing the votes and sowing discontent among the electorate.”
The goal of these voter suppression efforts was to target voters with messages designed to stoke outrage and/or invoke apathy in an effort to keep them home on election day — which is exactly what Williams and Kalvin promoted on their YouTube page.
Did the Russians Have Help?
Most of the 116 videos I watched generated very few views. The average video had less than 10 views, although a handful had more than that.
The discussion of American social and political issues was clumsy. Although the videos touched on some pressing problems in American society, it was apparent that the production was handled by someone who was looking in from the outside and didn’t quite grasp the issue at hand. This was particularly obvious in the efforts they made to reach out to African Americans, which were at times cringeworthy. Many of the videos also had spelling and grammatical errors in the caption and/or description. This wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy on its own, but it was hard to miss in the context of the clumsily produced content.
The awkwardness of the videos suggests that producing effective messages targeting specific subgroups of American voters may not be easy to accomplish without help from someone who understands American politics and culture — perhaps even American political operatives working with a data firm that specializes in voter targeting…?
Stay tuned for the rest of this series, which will examine themes in the content of the videos, as well as their connection to recent reports about Russian efforts to exploit racial divisions in American society.
