X Is Working With a GOP Consulting Firm

September 6, 2024:

X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, seemingly to handle the messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.

When WIRED emailed X for comment about the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, a reply came from Michael Abboud, the managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm, Targeted Victory. According to his LinkedIn, Abboud worked for the State Department in the last year of the Trump administration and as press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

Targeted Victory has had contracts with several Republican campaigns and political action committees (PACs) this election season to the tune of over $75 million, according to OpenSecrets. The group’s largest client is the Republican National Committee, which spent $11,128,739 on the firm between January 2023 and May 2024.

In his emailed reply, Abboud referred WIRED to a company statement from X about the suspension of the platform in Brazil, and said to reach out with further questions.

Elon Musk, X’s owner, has become more overt about his personal political views in recent months. In July, shortly following the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, Musk said he would be backing his candidacy for president. He then said he’d establish a PAC to support Trump to the tune of $45 million per month (he later backpedaled on the exact amount).

WIRED reached out to Targeted Victory and Abboud directly, and neither immediately responded to a request for comment.

X would not be the first tech company to work with the group. In 2022, reporting from the Washington Post found that Meta had hired Targeted Victory to run a campaign to sour public opinion on TikTok. The messaging campaign focused on framing TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, as a threat to Americans’ privacy and to the mental health of teens and children.

An emailed response from Targeted Victory on behalf of X is particularly notable; when journalists contact the press team at X, they rarely receive a reply. When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, one of his first moves as CEO was to lay off a substantial number of the company’s 6,000 employees. That move not only included the vast majority of the platform’s trust and safety team, the people who keep hate speech and disinformation off the platform, but also the company’s communications team.

For nearly a year, the auto response to the press email returned the poop emoji. More recently, the auto-response says “Busy now, please check back later.”

But X and Musk have been having an unusually rough time in the public eye over the past few weeks. After X violated an April court order from the Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) requiring the company to remove certain accounts and content that the court said spread disinformation about the integrity of the country’s elections, Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered access to the platform blocked in Brazil. The country is X’s third largest market, and for months, Musk has railed against Moraes online, calling him a dictator, accusing the court of censorship, and even comparing him to the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.

Meanwhile, Nick Pickles, the company’s head of global affairs, announced on Thursday that he was resigning, and investors are saying that their investments in the company are performing substantially worse than any had predicted.

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