But unlike her fellow fembots selling smizes for subscribers, Chen wasn’t taking money to hawk FitTea or the Fyre Fest on her socials: The Russian government gave the Canadian American Chen $10 million to peddle the despotate’s propaganda, according to the Justice Department.

The DOJ alleged that without registering as foreign agents, Chen and her husband accepted millions from the Russian state-controlled media company RT to co-found Tenet Media in Tennessee, funds that the DOJ maintains comprised nearly 90% of Tenet’s total cash deposits. Chen and her husband then paid unwitting commentators, regarded by the DOJ as victims who did not know Russia was financing the company, to publish content that Tenet tried to spin into Russophilic propaganda.

“While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment reads. Tenet only aggregated about 16 million views on YouTube across its 2,000 videos, or some measly 8,000 views per video.

The two suspects charged by the DOJ are the Russian RT employees who funded Chen and her husband. The latter couple is likely skirting criminal charges by complying with the authorities. But the indictment provides unique insight into the transactional and vacuous function of the “influencer” as a trade.

If the DOJ’s narrative is accurate, then Chen, who falsely accused American Jews of dual loyalty for caring about Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli, and American, Jews, was actually accepting millions to promulgate propaganda for a nation that continues to detain nine Americans, even after President Joe Biden exchanged multiple Russian spies and murderers to retrieve three American citizens.

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It is perhaps no small coincidence that Chen, once an ostensible conservative who supported former President Donald Trump, publicly urged fellow pro-life voters to vote against the Republican presidential nominee while she was taking money from the Russian government, which has explicitly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed Biden.

Parroting Russian talking points for pay is then no different than celibate TikTok teenagers who advertise Trojans or celebutantes on Snapchat who pretend supplements shed the pounds obliterated by a secret stash of Ozempic. It’s a reminder that a pretty face without an actual byline or record of reporting isn’t any different than the Instamodels selling skincare for simps, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a lesson that a full eight years after Russiagate, Russia remains really, really bad at actually entering the mainstream discourse.