You scooped me @chrisarvinsf! Two weeks ago, @ebakerwhite1 and I discovered an insane network of fake Twitter accounts attacking progressive politicians in SF. @EskSF has written an amazing article on it.

https://missionlocal.org/2020/10/bogus-social-media-accounts-amplfying-memes-moderate-groups-infiltrated-by-trumpists-welcome-to-san-francisco-politcs/

Ready for a rabbithole? Follow this thread

A couple weeks ago, a person called Emily Zeng began a meme campaign against SF D5 Supervisor Dean Preston. Zeng’s profile ( @EmilyZeng20) reads: “Meme girl. Social Justice and Equity in SF. BidenHarris2020. BLM+AsiansBelong. Meme-ing to get my outdoor living room back in SF D5.”

Here’s the thing though: there’s no Emily Zeng registered to vote in D5 – or any other SF district. And what’s more – Zeng’s account uses the profile pic of a PhD student in Tokyo named Emily S. Chen.

Zeng’s memes were quickly picked up by four other Twitter accounts, which use the names Amy Vuong, Joan Vogel, Steve Robinson, and Paul Medina. Vuong uses a profile pic of a Microsoft employee in WA named (!!) Emily Zeng. Vogel uses a pic of a HR manager in NJ named Amy Vogel.

Medina uses the picture of an eponymous personal trainer in Washington, DC, who tweets only sports takes and Emily Zeng memes. Robinson, too, tweets only about sports and Zeng memes (though nothing suggests he’s appropriated a likeness or lives out-of-town).

Another booster of Zeng is Amy Chen, an account with a stock photo profile pic and 6 followers, 5 of whom are Zeng, Vuong, Vogel, Medina, and Robinson. Those 5 accounts were all created in May 2020; Chen’s was created in 2018, but tweeted for the first time a few weeks ago.

There are no SF voters named Emily Zeng, Joan Vogel, or Paul Medina. There are voters named Amy Vuong & Steve Robinson, but both live in the Outer Sunset, not D5. The memes claim to be “paid for by De-Elect Dean Antoinette 2020”, but no such group is registered with SF Ethics.

So who’s behind the Emily Zeng memes? We don’t know. But we do know a group that’s enthusiastically spreading them: Vote and Change SF (V&CSF). This organization maintains pages on Twitter and Facebook and has a private Facebook group, which I joined last weekend.

The Facebook group, which now has over 600 members, was created on June 30, 2020 by venture capitalist Zhengren Jennifer Yan. Yan has been a consistent retweeter and poster of Emily Zeng memes -- both in the group and beyond it.

More on Yan: her Yelp account cross-posts to the Twitter account @Yap1776. This account (purported name: Jessica Yap) has tweeted support for Trump, used the QAnon-adjacent hashtags "savethechildren" and "saveourchildren", and recently been retweeting the Emily Zeng memes.

More on V&CSF: it features alt-right posts from Dinesh D’Souza, the Daily Wire, LawOfficer .com and David J. Harris Jr., along with posts from center-right groups like SOAR & Safe and Healthy Haight. It’s heavy on incarcerating houseless people and getting “tough on crime.”

One notable V&CSF representative (not an admin on FB, but a spokesperson and event host as per this video) is Arkady Itkin- an attorney, passionate Trump supporter, and anti-mask advocate who shares misogynistic dating tips for men on YouTube and Medium.

Other admins & moderators for the V&CSF group include Ewan Barker Plummer of Joel Engardio’s campaign and Families for San Francisco, and Ashley McGovern Wessinger of the Marina Community Association.

V&CSF promotes events for Vallie Brown and Joel Engardio & group members included at time of writing current sup candidates Engardio, Steven Martin-Pinto, Daniel Landry, and Danny Sauter, as well as Mark Dietrich of SOAR, Austin Hunter of GrowSF, & former DA candidate Nancy Tung.

And V&CSF is just one of a small network of groups that share this type of content on Facebook. One group with a lot of crossover is "Taking San Francisco Back" with 1.8k members. The SF Republican party is a member, along with – interestingly – Marjan (D1) and Ahsha (D11)

The admins of TSFB are also members of V&CSF. Jennifer Yan joined TSFB the day after it was created and is a frequent poster.

These two Facebook groups are part of a larger set of orgs that co-mingle right wing content with purported moderate Democratic politics, with varying degrees of membership, admin, and content overlap.

Why should you care about this? 2 reasons: first, someone is using Twitter accounts with fake names & photos, and a potentially unregistered expenditure committee, to wage a meme war against D5 Supervisor Dean Preston and local progressives, especially @BrandonHarami

And second, Vote and Change SF, and groups like it, combines self-described moderate Democrats with alt-right Trump supporters, are distributing those memes in an attempt to sway City Supervisor votes in D5, D7, D1, and other live local races.

Are these memesters real SF residents? Voters? Why are they using pics that don’t match their names, and names that don’t appear in the voter data file? Have they registered their new independent expenditure committee? And is V&CSF involved in the creation of the memes?

There may be good answers to all these questions; we don’t know. But, @EmilyZeng20, @Yap1776, we’d appreciate an explanation. SF deserves an open, honest policy debate – in D5, D1, and everywhere else. And we can do better than a fake-account-based meme campaign. End.

Update: That didn't take long @EmilyZeng20. I see you deleted the memes using Emily Chen's name and photo as well. I'll add some of them here for posterity.