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In the final days before the US presidential election, Elon Musk’s “X” account suspended the official account of a progressive, donor-backed voting initiative called SwapYourVote. The volunteer-run site attempts to get third-party voters in swing states to cast ballots for Kamala Harris, matching them with Democrats in strongly blue states who agree to vote for the candidate chosen by the swing state voter. X’s account was restored around 11 a.m. PT on Tuesday after being suspended two days earlier, on Sunday, when X called it spam.
“The account was detected by one of our automated spam defenses and was reinstated,” an X spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch on Tuesday. X Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy The use of automation to amplify information is prohibited.
Vote exchange, also called cross-voting or vote pairing, is a controversial practice It dates back to the 2000 US presidential electionMore than 36,000 supporters of Ralph Nader and Al Gore exchanged votes.
So far, SwapYourVote says nearly 12,000 voters have registered to participate in the 2024 election. While that’s a small percentage of America’s total electorate, it could have a measurable impact in several key swing states — like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona — Which is often determined by a few thousand votes.
SwapYourVote organizers are unclear about what they did to break the policy in the first place.
“We still don’t know what happened,” a SwapYourVote spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. “Maybe we got caught by automated spam filters because the account was new and we posted a lot? There is still a sense of suspicion that this will happen with the election coming up,” this person added.
Content moderation on X has been somewhat inconsistent in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, despite Musk’s alleged goal of turning X into a platform for free speech. Clemson University recently revealed A network of 686 AI-powered bots running political influence campaigns on X, many of which spread pro-Trump or pro-GOP propaganda. In September, X has suspended the account of a journalist who shared leaked screening documents for JD Vance. Later Blocked links to the leaked documentciting the content as harmful.
When visiting A Link to X account As for SwapYourVote on Tuesday morning, users received a message that read “Account suspended” and “X suspends accounts that violate X rules.” SwapYourVote’s social media accounts on other platforms, e.g Tik Tok and Instagramwas still active and accessible on Tuesday.
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