'White Dudes for Harris' fundraiser thinks Elon Musk might have suspended his account. He's going to keep using Twitter.
- Elon Musk owns Twitter/X, and he's publicly supporting Donald Trump.
- That means that when people have questions about what's happening at Twitter, they're going to wonder if the answer is "Elon Musk supports Trump."
On Monday night, a group calling itself "White Dudes for Harris" hosted an online fundraiser aimed at … white dudes who support Kamala Harris. Organizers said thousands joined the call, and that the event raised more than $4 million for the Harris presidential campaign.
During the event, says organizer Mike Nellis, he received two emails from Twitter telling him his dudes4harris account had been temporarily suspended, and that he'd need to verify his account to reinstate it, which he did.
Then, shortly after the event had finished, he Nellis says he got another Twitter email telling him the account had been fully suspended for "violating our rules against evading suspension."
As of Tuesday afternoon, the account has been restored.
What happened? Nellis isn't sure, but he tells me has a couple theories:
- Perhaps a group of Twitter users undertook a coordinated attempt to flag the account as spam or something else that would trigger Twitter's moderation settings.
- Or maybe Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, shut the account down, presumably because he is supporting Donald Trump in the fall election.
I've asked Twitter for a response but haven't heard back and don't expect to.
There has always been murkiness about how and why social media platforms ban, suspend, or otherwise rein in their users. You'll have a very hard time getting anyone at Meta to tell you, on the record, why a certain account was disciplined. The same was true at pre-Musk Twitter.
When Musk bought Twitter, he promised that would be one of the things he changed. Shortly after his acquisition, he opened up Twitter's internal files to journalists, including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who published a series of "Twitter Files" stories. One of the animating ideas behind the reports was to show how the previous Twitter managers made behind-the-scenes moderation decisions.
But good luck understanding why Musk makes any decisions at Twitter about content moderation or anything else. The most consistent thing about his ownership has been his inconsistency.
Musk's X ownership adds uncertainty
And Musk has added a new wrinkle to the uncertainty on his platform by publicly endorsing Trump's candidacy minutes after he survived an assassination attempt on July 13. (This came months after Musk said he was not donating money to either candidate in the upcoming election, and a day after reports surfaced that Musk was indeed funding a pro-Trump PAC.)
So now, whenever Musk does something on Twitter — whether it's in public or behind the scenes — it will be perfectly logical to wonder if he's doing it to support Trump.
And in cases like White Dudes for Harris, when it's unclear if he's done anything at all, people will be that much more inclined to believe he has done something.
That doesn't mean that people are going to stop using Twitter. That includes Nellis, who says he'll continue to use the platform to promote White Dudes For Harris. And he'll continue to use it for his day job — running Authentic, a digital fundraising company that specializes in progressive candidates and causes.
And Nellis doesn't just post on Twitter. He spends money advertising there. He says the reason he knew his account was restored on Tuesday was because his Twitter sales rep had sent him a note.
"It's undeniable how many movers and shakers are still active on Twitter. It's still shaping the conversation, no matter how I feel about who owns it," he says. "We're undeterred."