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X Is Working With a GOP Consulting Firm

Vittoria Elliott
2–3 minutes

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.