X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, apparently to handle messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.
When WIRED emailed X for comment on the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, it received a response from Michael Abboud, CEO of conservative consulting and PR firm Targeted Victory. According to his LinkedIn profile, Abboud worked for the State Department during the final 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) during this election season worth more than $75 million, according to Open secretsThe group’s largest client is the Republican National Committee, which spent $11,128,739 with the firm between January 2023 and May 2024.
In his emailed response, Abboud referred WIRED to a statement from Company X about the platform’s suspension in Brazil and asked it to contact him if it had any further questions.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, has been more open 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 president. He later said He would establish a PAC to support Trump to the tune of $45 million a month (he later retracted 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, Washington Post Report Meta was found to have hired Targeted Victory to run a campaign to sour public opinion on TikTok. The messaging campaign focused on portraying TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, as a threat to the privacy of Americans and the mental health of teens and children.
Particularly notable is an emailed response from Targeted Victory on behalf of X; when journalists reach out to X’s press team, they rarely receive a response. 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 included 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 automatic response to the press email returned the poop emojiMore recently, the auto-reply 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 Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) requiring the company to remove certain accounts and content that the court said spread misinformation about the integrity of the country’s election, 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 criticized 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 director of global affairs, announced on Thursday that He was giving upand investors say their investments in the company are acting substantially Worse than anyone had predicted.