Yonder, formerly named New Knowledge, is a company from Austin, Texas, specializing in information integrity, founded in 2015. It is known for studying online tactics which were used by the Internet Research Agency in an effort to influence the 2016 US Presidential election. In its early days, it was being used by the press to identify candidates that Russian social media accounts show interest in, and was involved in an election meddling scandal in the 2017 US Senate special election in Alabama. As of Fall 2019, the company and its official website have re-branded under the name Yonder. Yonder CEO, Johnathon Morgan, was profiled in HBO's 2020 documentary, . Yonder now supports both Government and Commercial customers as they try to better understand what's real and what's not online, as well as emerging narratives and factions that matter most to their brand and values. They often share their intelligence more broadly to help the general public better understand the actual groups behind differing perspectives on the social web.
Background
Lux Capital and GGV capital provided $11 million in capital for the company in 2018. The Hamilton68 database, which tracks disinformation on-line for the US German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy was built by the company. The company prepared "The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency" for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Two days after this report was published, a New York Times story broke about the company's participation in an experiment in which it simulated the bot-nets used during the US 2016 elections by the Internet Research Agency. According to a company internal report, they "orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was being amplified on social media by a Russian botnet." Renée DiResta, one of the principal authors of the Senate report on the Internet Research Agency, said that as she understood it the goal of the New Knowledge experiment was to "investigate to what extent they could grow audiences for Facebook pages using sensational news". The CEO, Johnathon Morgan, had his Facebook account suspended due to his participation in the project. Democratic donor Reid Hoffman donated $750,000 to American Emergent Technologies which provided funding for New Knowledge. He disavowed any specific knowledge of the project, called Project Birmingham.
Media use
Ruth Reader, writing for Fast Co in April 2020, cited Yonder findings in an article on Anti Vaxxer faction involvement with narratives regarding Vitamin C and a hypothetical Covid-19 treatment saying, "In the past several years, social media has given a soap box to a previously niche group of people who are against vaccination. This group, known colloquially as anti-vaxxers, fabricates stories about the danger of vaccines in attempt to discredit them. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has given some members of this faction an opportunity to spread more anti-vaccine propaganda, and it’s starting to make its way to the mainstream." Taylor Hatmaker, writing for TechCrunch in April 2020, cited findings in a new Yonder report] in relation to 5G consiparcy theories saying, "A report on coronavirus misinformation from the company notes “the mainstream is unusually accepting of conspiratorial thinking, rumors, alarm, or panic” during uncertain times — a phenomenon that explains the movement of misinformation that we’re seeing now. While the company estimates that it would normally take six to eight months for a “fringe narrative” to make its way from the edges of the internet into the mainstream, that interval looks like three to 14 days in the midst of COVID-19." In a press release, Yonder described their new product: "Yonder Narrative alerts users when a topic is about to go viral and analyzes how internet subcultures are affecting the narrative, contextualizes the conversation, authenticates which conversations are real and helps users make a decision." Robert Windrem, writing for NBC News in 2018, cited the company's report on the Internet Research Agency in an article about Green candidate Jill Stein's 2016 campaign. He also cited the company in 2019 to report increased activity on Russian bot-nets surrounding Democrat primary candidate Tulsi Gabbard. Both candidates and some media outlets have been critical of use of New Knowledge, given its own involvement in meddling in the Roy Moore-Doug Jones Senate race.
