NEW YORK, Sept 6 - Two days after U.S. authorities

accused two employees of Russian state media network RT of

coordinating an online network aimed at influencing the 2024

presidential election, more than 400 posts by Tenet Media, the

online content company at the heart of the case, were still

accessible on TikTok, unlabeled and untouched.

So too were Tenet Media's nearly 2,500 Instagram videos and

more than 4,000 posts on social network X, along with its posts

on Facebook and video platform Rumble, according to a Reuters

review of its social media accounts.

Of all the major platforms where Tenet distributed its videos,

so far only Alphabet's YouTube has taken action

penalizing the company, pulling down the main Tenet Media

channel along with four others operated by owner Lauren Chen on

Thursday.

The only other change detected by Reuters to those accounts

involved an advertisement Tenet had placed on Instagram, which

started running in August and was still active as of Wednesday,

but was disabled by Thursday.

None of the other social media companies responded to

Reuters requests for comment on how they planned to handle the

posts or whether Tenet Media was in violation of their

platforms' rules.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram,

also would not clarify whether it or Tenet had removed the

Instagram ad. Tenet Media likewise did not respond to a Reuters

request, nor did Chen or Liam Donovan, the two people named in

its incorporation records.

The platforms' apparent inaction on the campaign is a

striking departure from the aggressive efforts they have touted

in recent years to expose secretive foreign propaganda

campaigns, reflecting both the novelty of the tactics allegedly

used and the fraught politics of policing content posted by real

people inside the United States.

It also exposes a fresh challenge faced by the platforms as

Russia increasingly turns to unwitting American social media

stars to covertly influence voters ahead of U.S. elections this

year, a sort of digital update to Cold War-era practices of

laundering messages through journalists or front media outlets,

according to disinformation researchers.

"What we're ultimately grappling with is a problem that

exists in the real world. It's manifesting on social media in

the sense that the entity has a presence there, but it isn't a

social media problem per se," said Olga Belogolova, a

disinformation professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

International Studies and former head of influence operations

policy at Meta.

The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday that two RT

employees worked with foreign nationals in the United States to

set up a company in Tennessee that paid prominent conservative

commentators to post regular videos on topics designed to

amplify political divisions in the United States.

That company paid $8.7 million to the production companies

of three of the online stars it recruited and its founders

received more than $760,000, according to the indictment. The

commentators did not know the funding came from RT, the Justice

Department said.

Though the indictment did not name the company, details

provided in court filings match up with Tenet Media, a

Nashville-based company.

The offline nature of the alleged relationships between RT,

Tenet Media and the U.S. commentators makes the case unusual in

the world of online influence operations, which social media

companies began cracking down on after U.S. intelligence

concluded that Russia had used Facebook as part of a campaign to

help former President Donald Trump win the White House in 2016.

Moscow has denied that claim, as it also denied the U.S.

allegations on Wednesday. RT responded to the charges with

ridicule.

Most major online platforms now label state-affiliated media

organizations, while Meta, TikTok and YouTube owner Google

all produce either monthly or quarterly reports to

document their ongoing removal of coordinated networks of fake

accounts.

The companies also have rules requiring users to disclose

sponsorships by applying "branded content" and "paid

partnership" labels to relevant posts, tools generally used by

influencers paid to promote clothes, makeup and other products

to their thousands of followers.

Meta defines branded content as "a creator or publisher's

content that features or is influenced by a business partner for

an exchange of value, such as monetary payment or free gifts,"

according to its documentation explaining the rules.

Taking action against Tenet-related content, however,

entails dealing with accounts that are neither fake, nor

directly state-run, nor doing traditional product placements,

while also wading into the thorny politics of moderating the

speech of real U.S. conservative personalities.

Politicians on the right have accused social media platforms of

censoring their speech. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been

extending an olive branch their way, most recently in a letter

to Congress last month in which he expressed regret about some

of his company's moderation decisions.

Belogolova, the former Meta staffer, said social media

companies would be wise to deliberate carefully before applying

their rules in ways that could create dangerous precedents for

legitimate speech.

"I can guarantee you, having been on the other side of

something like this, that there are conversations happening

right now about the policy levers that exist and what would be

appropriate and inappropriate to use in this particular

situation, and trying not to make snap decisions," she said.