When Kat Abughazaleh was fired from his job as an extremist researcher and video producer at Media Matters last year, Elon Musk personally cried out to X to celebrate her misfortune.
“Karma is real,” Musk said.
But, as Abughazaleh said in a video announcing the Congressional campaign on Monday, she is not afraid to stand up to Musk, especially as the impact on the federal government escalates.
Instead, the 26-year-old looks to Illinois’ 9th District. His current representative, 80-year-old Democrat Jan Shakowski, was first elected to Congress before Abugazare was born.
“I have an idea I want to push, and I have a big one [social media] Platform,” Abugazare told TechCrunch on Monday.
Abughazaleh has built her online audience through her work at Media Matters. There, he became known for creating videos that decipher the rhetoric and inaccuracy of Fox News. However, when Musk sued the media over an article about how the ads were placed alongside Pro Nazi content, rising legal costs led the nonprofit to fire Abughazaleh and the other 12.
Currently an independent social media creator, she has attracted over half a million followers across the platform for her progressive political content, with the largest audience in Tiktok (222,000 followers).
“There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to afford a home, groceries or healthcare with the rest of your money,” she said in the campaign announcement. “Families need to expand free childcare, social security, and our intransferable rights should not depend on who is in power.”
Abugazare did not expect the run-in with Musk to be associated with the wider public. But we know the feeling that more than 30,000 federal employees will lose their jobs due to billionaires’ plot more than 10 months after Musk celebrated the layoffs.
“A lot of people in journalism have experienced a kind of trial period, or a dry run of what Trump and Musk have done to other parts of the country, especially with this beat of disinformation,” she told TechCrunch.
“We knew what was going to happen… We’re angry at the right, but that also means we have tools that fight back and know what’s going on and know how to handle it.”
Tiktkar has become a political candidate
Young people have historically leaned towards liberals, but Gen Z voters changed their more conservative shift in last year’s election. Abugazare thinks this is the product of poor outreach from the Democrats.
“The big problem Democrats have is their digital strategy, and I think people like me and young people have a better understanding. [of the internet]She said. “That’s what we grew up together.”
Some critics may think her age is a double-edged sword, as she is young enough to have a long online footprint. But Abugazare is not worried. As she wrote to Sceptics in X, “I hope you enjoy my middle school one-way fan blog and my cat photos.”
Trump’s Time – The President literally owns a social media platform where he constantly posts – showing personality online isn’t that taboo.
“We have a president who will always post anything that comes to mind,” she said. “I think we’re doing well, as we’ve had a presence since we were 13.”
Given her history with Musk, she doesn’t plan on focusing X on her digital strategy. Over all other social media platforms, Abughazaleh prioritizes Bluesky, where he has around 154,000 followers.
On Monday, for example, she posted an announcement of the campaign to Bluesky for an hour and a half before moving to other platforms.
“I really like the Blueski policy on a lot of things,” she said. “They are hiring more moderators, and many other locations are either not relaxed or they are firing moderators.”
For example, Meta overhauled its content moderation policy in January and ended its third-party fact-checking program.
Bluesky has grown to over 33 million users, and even former President Barack Obama joined the platform over the weekend. But its population is still relatively small compared to long-time social giants like Instagram and X.
Anyway, Abughazaleh’s strategy has proven successful so far. In the first seven hours of her campaign, she raised $100,000 with an average contribution of $45.
“We have won the most donations on social media from Bluesky from any other platform,” Abughazaleh told TechCrunch.
Abughazaleh is also passionate about the open source nature of Bluesky. She is trying to echo that transparency on her YouTube channel. There, they will be sharing videos recording their campaign experiences.
“I think I’m really transparent about how I run for the office because I feel like this black hole that seems much more difficult than it should,” she said.
Even if she doesn’t win a seat in Congress, she hopes that her openness about this process will encourage other Gen Z candidates to run.
“If this campaign goes as planned, I will be the youngest woman elected to Congress,” she said. “But if we came in and there was another candidate who was younger than me, I think it would be cool.”
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