“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 first video on the YouTube page of Williams and Kalvin was uploaded on July 19, 2016 — the same day Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president.

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.