X appears to be working with a well-known Republican advisory group, apparently, to address reports surrounding the shutdown of the social media platform in Brazil.
Targeted Victory has contracts with several Republican campaigns and political action committees (PACs) this election season worth more than $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 and May 2024
Elon Musk, the owner of X, has become more outspoken about his personal political views in recent months. In July, shortly after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Musk said he would support his bid for the presidency. He then said he would set up a $45 million-a-month pro-Trump PAC (he later denied the exact amount).
X won’t be the first tech company to work with the group. In 2022 reports from The Washington Post found that Meta hired Targeted Victory to run a smear campaign on TikTok. The messaging campaign focused on portraying TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, as a threat to Americans’ privacy and the mental health of teenagers and children.
An email response from Targeted Victory on behalf of X is particularly noteworthy; when journalists contact X’s press team, they rarely get a response. When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, one of his first moves as CEO was to lay off a significant number of the company’s 6,000 employees. The move involved not only the vast majority of the platform’s trust and safety team — the people who keep hate speech and misinformation off the platform — but also the company’s communications team.
For almost a year, the press email autoresponder returned the poop emoji. More recently, the auto-reply says “I’m busy now, please check back later.”
But X and Musk have had an unusually rough time in the public eye over the past few weeks. After X violated an April court order from Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court that required the company to remove certain accounts and content that the court said spread misinformation 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 Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.
Meanwhile, Nick Pickles, the company’s head of global affairs, announced on Thursday that he was resigning, and investors said their investments in the company were performing significantly worse than expected.
