Remi Barrette Appears to Be Re-Running Yonder's Birmingham Project

A Series on Misinformation, Disinformation and Subterfuge

Yonder Inc, formerly New Knowledge, out of Austin, Texas interfered with the 2017 Special Election, Alabama Senate race by manipulating social media in what researchers and reporters dubbed the Birmingham Project.

From NPR

The whole thing used “Russian bots” to build a false narrative that Russia was backing Roy Moore’s campaign. The Russian bot story was fed to the press, who then reported. While it is still unclear if the story had any impact on the race where Roy Moore was already beset with allegations of sexual impropriety with a child half his age, the links of bots, data scientists, Yonder were already something I was digging into when I saw what ran across Remi Barrette’s feed as conspirator0, via a 10/14 request by an account operating often within the Rocco Castoro/Doug Stewart network dedicated to school board related elections, @caseyho, that uses a fake profile picture.

CaseyHo is not an authentic account to begin with, parked May 16, 2013 by its previous owner. When the account was reactivated April 23, 2020, the first tweet it was interacting with was Matt Shapiro’s account, @politicalmath. That journalist/OpEd writer was a major player in the attacks on Rebekah Jones. Six interactions with Shapiro, on 4/23, 4/30. 5/14, 5/22, 5/26, 6/20, all regarding COVID. Odd for two accounts that do not follow each other.

While I am not certain of who operates the account, it has consistently shown up within Chirpty interacting with many of Matt Donovan socks and his associates

On her own Chirpty, we see Darcy B. who operates the bot account given to her by Matt Donovan (Neo_antiquarian), with Chad Loder, Matt Donovan (clown), and Nicole Chenelle in ring two. Outer ring has one more known Donovan sock and Remi Barrette. Most likely this account is one of the soccer moms mind warped into brigading obliviously with the hackers, Nazis and felons Matt and Nicole tend to run with, similar to why Darcy still sticks around.

Now back to Remi and his less than two-day turn-around on the October 14 noontime request to solve this not too mysterious Russian—er Turkish—er Family Fun—er, what is now Remi, astroturf mystery.

What in Yonder is going on here?

One can’t help but admire that again, we see someone with extensive work in creating conspiracies using bots, a claim of astroturfing, and likely fake data, over and over and over again, thinking he isn’t going to get caught and called out for repeating stuff.

Yonder has likely hundreds of thousands of available bots with older creation dates, given how easy it was to build a script to spawn them without emails. I have found one network of around 50K bots, all empty accounts that appeared to have been made the same day while looking through follows.

Sounds fairly easy for Remi to do, who scripts AI and noxious spamming attacks meant to cause denial of service attacks. Putting up such information, also makes him look smart, which is the point of his other manufactured bot conspiracies. Here is one page of twelve regarding Remi’s game plan, spelled out by Jeff Giesea, the Peter Thiel protege that deleted all his tweets with Yonder’s Renee DiResta.

Yonder manufactures the social media discussions, which in turn leads to coverage in the mainstream media.

It’s essentially the same thing Remi pulled with Rebekah Jones’s campaign too, pushing out fancy graphs, implies what they mean and then others assist in bringing attention to the manufactured data within the media. He eventually admitted his “evidence” didn’t prove the claims he made.

Here was my favorite response to Remi’s thread.

The whole point of these accounts was to be found, just like what happened when Yonder ran the Birmingham Project. So we dig with a keyword pairing conspirator0 to Roy Moore. Plenty of hits. Most of them matriculate during one stretch in early December, roughly two months after initial reports on October 17 of Russian bots beginning to follow Roy Moore. Those ones were patently obvious, just as the ones above as they used Russian language. (Clicking on the following images will link to the original tweet as long as Remi keeps them up)

Remi dedicated multiple threads to Roy Moore’s special election, including a long one on “Canadian influence” accounts. This one stood out.

Here is another part of that “Canadian Roy Moore influencer” thread.

Here is how that thread ended.

Remi also mentions ZQ spent ten hours on this side project.

Not quite a smoking gun, until one examines the actual smoking gun #PJNET leading interestingly to this website.

From the main page on the website.

The hashtag PJNET these bots Remi “studies” were pre-purposed just as the original set of bots had been, to logically be found and connected back to “Russia.” This is where things become more obvious and less muddled regarding what Remi Barrette is doing here.

This is where the fake data scientist, as Louise Mensch calls her former coconspirator on the Alfa Bank Trump Tower Wiretap conspiracy, goes in, suggesting these tweets are Russian slyly without actually saying so directly. That last step is intended for social media speculation and hopefully main stream media reporting. This thread creation action Remi does, served as reinforcement of the already circulating conspiracy that Russians are interfering with the Special Election.

Remi then goes and looks at a few more accounts to build the narrative further.

This account’s tweets were not found among the Russian Internet Research Agency’s archived on RussiaTweets.com

Sure looks like Russian bots, right? They weren’t.

By later getting caught December of 2018 over its manufactured narratives pushing out disinformation, the org once known as New Knowledge had to rebrand itself as Yonder. Here is one takeaway from NYTimes reporting on that Op.

Yonder’s boss Jonothan Morgan set up Facebook pages and supported a conservative write-In candidate, boosted that candidate adding 10K follows on his Twitter account.

One of the OTHER things that these “Russian bots” manufactured by Yonder apparently did was this headline, noted by Richie Guinn (Counterchekist), whom Joe Fionda claims works for the company.

Remi, Mensch’s Bot boy co-conspirator0, owes America an explanation on what role he played in each of the now known conspiracies he participated in, the Alfa Bank Trump Tower Wiretap conspiracy, the Rebekah Jones Turkish bot buying conspiracy, his attacks on BNN using Twitter Safety tools, and project Birmingham which his work given above clearly added to.