Organizer of “White Dudes for Harris” wonders if Elon Musk suspended him

• Twitter/X is owned by Elon Musk, who publicly supports Donald Trump.
• This means that when people ask questions about what is happening on Twitter, they will wonder if the answer is “Elon Musk supports Trump.”
• This is a theory that explains what happened to the “White Dudes For Harris” account this week.

On Monday night, a group calling itself “White Dudes for Harris” held an online fundraiser aimed at … white men who support Kamala Harris. Organizers said thousands joined the call and the event raised more than $4 million for Harris’ presidential campaign.

During the event, organizer Mike Nellis says he received two emails from Twitter informing him that his dudes4harris account had been temporarily suspended and that he needed to verify it to restore it, which he did.

Then, shortly after the event ended, Nellis said he received another Twitter email informing him that his account had been completely suspended due to “violating our suspension evasion rules.”

The account has been restored since Tuesday afternoon.

What happened? Nellis isn’t sure, but he has a few theories:

• A group of Twitter users may have made 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, closed the account, presumably because he supports Donald Trump in the fall elections.

I asked Twitter for a response but have not received and do not expect one.

There has always been a lack of clarity about how and why social media platforms ban, suspend, or otherwise restrict their users. It will be very difficult to get anyone at Meta to officially tell you why a particular account was disciplined. The same was true of Twitter before Musk.

When Musk bought Twitter, he promised this would be one of the things he would change. Shortly after his takeover, he opened Twitter’s internal files to journalists, including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who published a series of “Twitter Files” stories. One of the invigorating ideas behind the reports was to show how former Twitter executives made moderation decisions behind the scenes.

But good luck understanding why Musk makes decisions about content moderation or anything else at Twitter. The most consistent thing about his ownership has been his inconsistency.

Musk’s X ownership creates uncertainty

And Musk has added a new twist to the uncertainty in his platform by publicly endorsing Trump’s candidacy just minutes after Trump survived an assassination attempt on July 13. (This came months after Musk said he would not donate money to either candidate in the upcoming election, and a day after reports surfaced that Musk was indeed funding a pro-Trump PAC.)

So when Musk does something on Twitter today – whether publicly or behind the scenes – it’s perfectly logical to ask whether he’s doing it to support Trump.

And in cases like White Dudes for Harris, where it’s unclear whether he did anything at all, people will be even more inclined to believe him. has Completed something.

But that doesn’t mean people will stop using Twitter. That includes Nellis, who says he’ll continue to use the platform to promote White Dudes For Harris. And he’ll also 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 also spends money on advertising there. He says he only found out his account had been restored on Tuesday because his Twitter salesperson sent him a message.

“There’s no denying how many movers and shakers are still active on Twitter. It still shapes the conversation, no matter what I think about who owns it,” he says. “We’re not going to let that deter us.”