X appears to be working with a well-known republican consulting group to handle messaging regarding the suspension of social media platforms in Brazil.
WIRED emailed X seeking comment on the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil and received a response from Michael Abboud, managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm Target Victory. According to his LinkedIn, Abboud worked at the State Department in the final years of the Trump administration and was press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.
Target Victory has signed more than $75 million in contracts with multiple Republican campaigns and political action committees (PACs) this election season, according to Open Secrets. The group’s largest client is the Republican National Committee, which has spent $11,128,739 with the company from January 2023 to May 2024.
In an email response, Abboud referred WIRED to X’s corporate statement about the platform suspension in Brazil and encouraged WIRED to contact him with any further questions.
X owner Elon Musk has become more open about his political views in recent months. In July, shortly after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Musk said he supported Trump’s run for president. He then said he was setting up a $45 million a month PAC to support Trump (he later retracted the exact figure).
WIRED reached out to Targeted Victory and Abboud directly, but neither company immediately responded to requests for comment.
X is not the first tech company to work with the group. In 2022, The Washington Post reported that Meta had hired Target Victory to run a campaign to sow public opinion against TikTok. The messaging campaign focused on positioning TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, as a threat to the privacy of Americans and the mental health of teens and children.
The email response sent by Targeted Victory on behalf of X was particularly noteworthy: when journalists contact X’s PR team, they rarely get a response. When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, one of his first actions as CEO was to lay off a significant number of the company’s 6,000 employees. That included the majority of the platform’s trust and safety team, which removes hate speech and misinformation from the platform, as well as the company’s communications team.
For nearly a year, the autoresponder to press emails returned a poop emoji, and more recently the autoresponder began saying, “We’re busy right now, check back later.”
But X and Musk have had an unusually tough time in the public eye in recent weeks. Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered X to block access to the platform in Brazil after the company violated a court order from Brazil’s High Electoral Court (TSE) in April to remove certain accounts and content that the court found to be spreading disinformation about the integrity of the country’s elections. Brazil is X’s third-largest market, and Musk has spent months lambasting Moraes online, calling him a dictator, accusing him of court censorship, and likening him to Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.
Meanwhile, the company’s head of international operations, Nick Pickles, announced his resignation on Thursday, and investors have said their investment in the company is performing much worse than expected.
