Following Kamala Harris’s announcement of her presidential run, users on Elon Musk’s platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), have encountered issues when attempting to follow her campaign account, @KamalaHQ.
X is rate limiting follows for @kamalaHQ pic.twitter.com/6bonIqWDPM
— Chris Skovron (@cskovron) July 22, 2024
@KamalaHQ, the official rapid response page for Harris’s campaign, greeted potential followers with a message indicating they had reached their “limit” and could not follow additional accounts.
Technical Difficulties or Targeted Limitation?
This limitation message is typically employed to prevent spam or “rate limiting,” usually triggered when an account follows hundreds of others rapidly. However, in this instance, it appears to have been applied to Harris’s campaign account rather than the users.
An initial search by our Twitter account confirmed that @KamalaHQ was indeed limited, though subsequent searches have indicated that the issue might be slowly resolving.
Twitter is preventing users from following the Kamala Harris @KamalaHQ account
— David Leavitt 🎲🎮🧙♂️🌈 (@David_Leavitt) July 22, 2024
It’s almost as if @elonmusk is engaging in election interference…
Ironically, it’s the top news story by the twitter AI Grok in the “for you” tab pic.twitter.com/pU4SVmr6SB
The situation has, however, raised quite a few eyebrows given Elon Musk’s increasingly visible support for Donald Trump and his intense dislike for just about anything Democrat, liberal or “woke.”
Musk is constantly critical of the Democrats and, in the wake of Joe Biden stepping down, even retweeted a post from former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, stating, “We’re not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system.”
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Musk has also reposted several statements critical of Harris, such as a QAnon-linked influencer’s claim that “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of power,” following Biden’s resignation and has also directly criticized Kamala Harris.
On Sunday, he tweeted a video of Harris stating her pronouns and describing her appearance for accessibility purposes, captioning the post, “Imagine 4 years of this….”
While stating your pronouns might be scary and too “woke” for the people in the far-right, Harris’ video, however, was taken out of context as she was describing herself to disability rights leaders and journalists, some of whom were visually disabled.
Imagine 4 years of this … https://t.co/gFwWAv15Qx
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024
Furthermore, given that he recently pledged to donate $45 million monthly to support Trump’s re-election campaign, people have found the limitation of Kamala Harris’s campaign account all the more suspicious.
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Elon Musk has been a self-proclaimed free speech advocate, and while that may sound good on paper, there’s been a massive increase in misinformation and right-wing propaganda on Twitter in the last couple of years, alongside hateful racist and sexist discrimination.
Hey @elonmusk is this why you brought Andrew Tate back back onto twitter? pic.twitter.com/zCDYGYbBwZ
— David Leavitt 🎲🎮🧙♂️🌈 (@David_Leavitt) July 21, 2024
Just recently, Andrew Tate was seen publicly calling a person the N-word in response to the user’s criticism of Hulk Hogan in Elon Musk’s X, and he did not seem to face any repercussions as such, with both his account and the tweet still live.