December 21, 2019

Rachel Maddow ran a hilariously terrifying and factually false YouTube video in which a fictional cartoon character named Mr. Banana talks about how awesome Russia is. The video is one of many put out by Russian backed social media companies that put out content to introduce pro-Russian and anti-American content into the world.

Maddow hilariously opens with:

And also what about this question of foreign interference? On that last point we have some news tonight. And for this news let's turn to Mr. Banana. I said Mr. Banana. Go ahead. Mr. Banana, take it away.

Mr. Banana jumps in:

MR. BANANA: History of Russia like you've never heard it before. Mr. Banana wants to know what you think about when when you hear the word Russia. Do you think of a bear and a bottle of vodka and a balalaika in his paw? Or maybe you think about President Putin in the Red Square in Moscow.

Maddow cannot contain her glee at Mr. Banana:

MADDOW: Look how excited Mr. Banana is to see Mr. Putin. "Oh, my god, look at him, he's so dreamy! And he's right there in the YouTube frame with me!" and Mr. Banana can barely contain himself. He's going to unpeel right in front of us. This slightly idiomatically incorrect but accent-free English video is not a very good history of Russia even though that's what it says it is. But it is sort of slickly produced, a slick for YouTube production. It is designed to seem like at least as far as you can trust Mr. Banana you ought to be able to trust this telling of Russian history. It's a 12-minute long video. I'm not going to show you the whole thing, but let me show you a little piece of what I mean by it being not idiomatically correct as well as not good history. Put your balalaika in your paw, and come along with me.

Mr. Banana talks about Russian symbols. Ok.

MR. BANANA: It's also the time of the creation of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet by two brothers who are Christian missionaries. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly the strange symbols you see in Russian cuisine menus.

Maddow can't stop laughing.

MADDOW: Oh, those are the strange symbols you see in Russian cuisine menus. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's exactly the same strange symbols you see in Russian cuisine menus, comrade. Mr. Banana goes on in this vein for quite some time, in somewhat painful detail, but it really picks up when we get to Joseph Stalin.

Mr. Banana has a fun view of Stalin:

MR. BANANA: The second leader after Lenin's death was Joseph Stalin. He started to recover the country after the revolution. Joseph reformed the country. He took the wealth from rich people and property of the middle class and united all these people with poor ones in the collective farm and collective property. Russian Robin Hood. Bang, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June of 1941.

Maddow cracks up about the Stalin gloss over:

MADDOW: And then we're onto World War II. Yeah, but you know, that's pretty much what Joseph Stalin is remembered for, being like Robin Hood, bang. Yeah, Joseph Stalin he was known as a reformer who was kind to the poor. I mean, it's weird, right? If you scroll a couple more minutes into it you get to a part where they explain that the way Alaska became a part of the United States was that Nikita Khrushchev gave Alaska to the United States in 1957 as a present, as a gift which a really weird take on Alaska, which the United States actually bought from Russia in the 1860s. But it you want to call it a gift from Khrushchev in the 1950s, then yeah you've been getting your history from Mr. Banana.

So here's the thing, the company that makes that Mr. Banana let me tell you how awesome Stalin was, oh, my god it's Putin, history of Russia, right? The company that makes that turns out to be inexplicably massive online. They're called TheSoul Publishing. They're the subject of a fascinating investigative report that's just come out at Lawfare by Lisa Kaplan where Kaplan reports, quote, "measured in terms of views and subscribers TheSoul Publishing has the third largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube, outranked only by Disney and Warner Media. It goes Disney, Warner Media, and then the Mr. Banana people. This TheSoul media company. As of November this year, the third largest on youtube. "It is run by Russian nationals based in and managed from Cyprus. Funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And last year in 2018 it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues — and it made those purchases in rubles."

Facebook did just ban over 600 pro-Trump accounts it found were fake. But just a gentle and terrifying reminder that every time social media finds one Russian propaganda outlet, 20 more are out there pushing pro-Russian, anti-American videos, memes and tweets. This is the world we live in going into 2020.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon