How Yonder Exerts Operational Control Over Media
A Series on Misinformation, Disinformation and Subterfuge
Yonder, the Austin, Texas company known best for its creation and use of Project Birmingham interfering with the 2017 Alabama Senate race, has as its central mission the task of crafting and protecting social media narratives that generally serve a political purpose. Their secondary mission is to protect those narratives by attacking and removing threads, stories, people and accounts that are perceived as threats to the primary purpose of the company through almost any means necessary.
When I recently spoke with a West coast journalist regarding my observations and work, I was surprised to be told he knew of kassandraseven (Susan Portnoy) and Louise Mensch since 2016, wound up on Yonder’s blocklists along with millions of others, had his entire group supporting a liberal So-Cal Congressional campaign infiltrated, with 28/30 of the Twitter accounts banned permanently for Spam and Manipulation without having broken any rules. Because his work outside of politics online was at one time essential to his community’s public safety, he then created new replacement accounts on separate phone lines and email addresses. These too were banned almost immediately with the common theme being likely his use of his name and likeness. So he made a choice. He gave up his Constitutional rights under the First Amendment to exercise political expression, and was allowed only then to exist online holding a social media account.
Let me repeat that.
This man stopped talking about and expressing his political opinions, his first amendment rights, in exchange for being allowed to exist online.
That was 2016.
Until he read my abbreviated 12-page White Paper on Yonder he had no idea what had happened to his group. At the same time Yonder had been targeting his campaign volunteer group online, there were real world threats with cars following them home and to work after appearing at political events. He was afraid, not for himself, but for other people. What was striking about this conversation was that there was zero reason or justification to use intimidation tactics when the candidate being supported had a low-likelihood of winning. The point of such things is to reduce future participation in support of democracy, a pure authoritarian approach to public decent.
Which brings me to this piece by Jim Stewartson.
For longtime readers they know Susan Portnoy, the former VP of Communications at Condé Nast was recruited to work for Yonder, likely as a subcontractor paid under a shell company, to run malign influence operations on Twitter and other social media using the kassandraseven handle. We know Susan to be K7 because she initially linked her single purpose hate account to her real world work she no longer maintains, as a travel blogger and photographer.
Susan plays a major role in destroying that 2016 volunteer Democrat campaign group on behalf of Yonder, having led a team that befriended and manipulated its way into the DMs and group chats, only attacking/destroying once they identified the political ideologies and support of Liberal causes and political campaigns she knew couldn’t be steered towards Bernie Sanders. This though is still about the present work of the trolling industrialized complex.
Why is Yonder frantically contacting media to falsely discredit Jim Stewartson over Susan Portnoy, AKA KassandraSeven’s correct identification now when doing such requires the media to then make their efforts to hide a truth a story itself?
Jim Stewartson and his work on exposing Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, along with their underlings like General Mike Flynn, is still a potent narrative threat that could prevent Twitter being used as a radicalization engine to restart and build another January 6th type of event here in the US. Because Jim is a threat, and his influence is growing larger, Yonder seeks to limit that threat social engineering him into invisibility with such letters. Or at least that is how they likely thought that one would work out for them.
Competent news desks and reporters always used to verify work and sources until they started citing “Anons” conspirator0, maxnordau or travis_view in their reporting. That needs to stop, especially at outlets like WaPo and NYTimes printing unverified and unsourced claims like Matt Gaetz no longer being under federal investigation for child-sex trafficking because of a made-up deadline regarding the midterm election. I have to ask a big question.
How many bogus stories did Yonder and associated orgs get into publication with either Anons or supported influencers using real names that I have yet to find?
It’s likely larger than the instances that I have already detailed in other articles with conspirator0, Remi Barrette being the main source describing what he himself did to inauthentically remove Rebekah Jones, FL1 House Democrat candidate from Twitter, with a couple of non-named “Twitter spokesperson” being either he or someone else within the operation.
Here is one such example of one of the associated PayPal Mafia orgs influencing media that I haven’t reported on previously, this one targeting Rebekah Jones’s accurate complaint Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis had manipulated public reporting data to hide COVID fatalities, in order to give a false impression he had handled a crisis he simply ignored.
It’s Fox, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that its reporting wouldn’t be accurate. What should be is that David Rutz just flat out used two sock accounts known now to be networked and seemingly working for the Governor’s spokeswoman Christina Pushaw for over a year at this point.
Here is the first one, Matt Shapiro’s PoliMath account. I will point out that Matt unlike most of the Ops supporting the Florida GOPs political operations, didn’t take deceptively painstaking steps to hide whom he was. His account leads to his writing on Medium and Substack. At least one of those included an embedded link to himself appearing in a YouTube video in a podcast style format.
Using Matt Shapiro secretly as a source hiding his identity behind a sock account when he was writing political hit pieces against Jones for National Review and a couple other publications, isn’t just shoddy journalism. This next bit indicates why he was chosen.
What made the above statement so absurd is it was misattributed to PoliMath when it was given at the end of the article just before citing fellow Pushaw influencer Andrew McGimpsey’s MaxNordau account.
Who directed Mr. David Rutz to add these two influencers to his reporting? The obvious answer was Florida Governor’s Spokeswoman Christina Pushaw who previously did such foreign narrative “work” for Putin connected Oligarchs looking to launder their own reputations. At the time she was directing a mob of single purpose hate accounts along with conspirator0 (Remi Barrette), kassandraseven (Susan Portnoy) preparing to rerun an adapted version of Yonder’s Project Birmingham to frame and remove Rebekah Jones from Twitter. Here was my piece on that:
Everything is about narrative.
Whenever news hits that presents a threat to an established media narrative that the PayPal Mafia wants to maintain, companies like Yonder are activated to address the threat. Some of that work is directing disinformation into the mainstream media as shown above. Other work done are writing articles and short form video across the internet as a counter message. Because these articles and videos tend to trend high within search engines, it is very likely Yonder manipulates those by scripting bots to repeatedly log views or specific search parameters that in turn cause them to trend.
On social media, Yonder operatives attack people who are sharing the content along with those people who comment in a manner inconsistent with their mission.
Remember this?
What happened to Ben Collins thread here was so blatant and obvious.
Someone with Twitter Console access, either internally or more likely a third party such as Remi Barrette’s conspirator0, temporarily restricted each account shortly after they retweeted and/or liked the narrative-offending content. That reduced reach significantly preventing the content to go viral.
So why not instead restrict Ben with a console?
Considering that Twitter a month later around December 15th, was willing to exercise control over mainstream media behavior suspending accounts over manufactured ElonJet nonsense where none had broken any stated rules, it is a good question.
Had they restricted Ben Collins that would have started the media alarm bells, made things a bigger story, and likely would have seen larger behavioral revolts with news outlets vacating Twitter permanently along with large swaths of audience needed to normalize stuff like murder memes, antisemitism, and supremacy Elon posts or replies to conveniently on his exceedingly large account. Clipping the accounts spreading the post about Elon worked best at the time, though Ben Collins offense over his lack of impartiality over a fascist takeover by the PayPal Mafia was never forgotten, just delayed, executed by NBC the day after Elon exerted dominion over other journalists altering possible future behavior over a non-dox.
So what is a Twitter Console? This is:
A console is a developer tool that gives a controller access to any Twitter account, to read their DMs, to know their phone number and email address, and things that have to do with suspensions. Bari Weiss, a third party, has access to everybody’s personal Twitter information including government officials, because Elon Musk “trusts” and let her. When I saw this message I knew I had to act.
I sent the following email regarding Robert McNeece’s suicide, with my computer autocorrecting into the wrong spelling, changing the “c” to “s.”
Of course talking about how Yonder and Twitter likely conspired to bury all pre-suicide mentions of McNeece isn’t the news Elon Musk wants Bari Weiss to tell. Sigh. I at least gave her the chance.