Once a target of Musk’s ire, Gen Z creator Kat Abughazaleh is running for Congress
When Kat Abughazaleh obtained laid off from her job as an extremism researcher and video producer at Media Issues final 12 months, Elon Musk personally chimed in on X to have a good time her misfortune.
“Karma is actual,” Musk said.
However as Abughazaleh stated in a video on Monday asserting her campaign for Congress, she’s not afraid of standing as much as Musk, particularly as his influence on the federal government escalates.
As an alternative, the 26-year-old has her eye on Illinois’ Ninth District. The present consultant, the 80-year-old Democrat Jan Schakowsky, was first elected to Congress earlier than Abughazaleh was even born.
“I’ve concepts that I need to push, and I’ve an enormous [social media] platform,” Abughazaleh advised TechCrunch on Monday. “I felt I didn’t need to wait round for somebody to do one thing after I might do one thing proper now.”
Abughazaleh constructed her on-line viewers by means of her work at Media Issues, the place she grew to become recognized for making movies decoding the rhetoric and inaccuracies of Fox Information. However when Musk sued Media Matters over an article about how X positioned commercials alongside pro-Nazi content material, the mounting authorized prices led the nonprofit to put off Abughazaleh and 12 others.
Now an impartial social media creator, she has amassed over half one million followers throughout platforms for her progressive political content material, with her biggest audience (222,000 followers) on TikTok.
“There’s completely no cause you shouldn’t be capable to afford housing, groceries, and healthcare with some cash leftover,” she stated in her marketing campaign announcement. “Households ought to have free childcare, Social Safety ought to be expanded, and our inalienable rights shouldn’t be depending on who’s in energy.”
Abughazaleh didn’t count on her run-ins with Musk to be relatable to the broader public. However over 10 months after Musk celebrated her layoff, greater than 30,000 federal employees now know the sensation of dropping their jobs because of the billionaire’s machinations.
“Lots of people in journalism, particularly on this disinformation beat, have been going by means of sort of a trial interval, or a observe run, a dry run of what Trump and Musk have been doing to the remainder of the nation,” she advised TechCrunch.
“We knew what was going to occur… We’re upset that we’re proper, however that additionally implies that we’ve instruments to struggle again and know what’s taking place and know how one can deal with it.”
A TikToker turned political candidate
Whereas younger individuals have traditionally leaned liberal, Gen Z voters shifted extra conservative in final 12 months’s election. Abughazaleh thinks this a product of poor outreach from Democrats.
“I feel the massive downside Democrats have is their digital technique, and folks like me and folks which are youthful have a greater understanding [of the internet],” she stated. “It’s one thing that we grew up with.”
Some critics might imagine her age is a double-edged sword since she’s younger sufficient to have a prolonged on-line footprint. However Abughazaleh isn’t apprehensive. As she wrote to 1 skeptic on X, “I hope you get pleasure from my center faculty One Route fan weblog and footage of my cat.”
Within the period of Trump — the president actually owns a social media platform the place he posts consistently — it’s not so taboo anymore to indicate persona on-line.
“We now have a president that posts no matter involves his thoughts at any time,” she stated. “I feel that we’re superb with similar to, having a presence from age 13.”
Given her historical past with Musk, she isn’t planning to heart X in her digital technique. Above all different social media platforms, Abughazaleh is prioritizing Bluesky, the place she has round 154,000 followers.
On Monday, for instance, she posted her marketing campaign announcement completely on Bluesky for an hour and a half earlier than shifting to different platforms.
“I actually like Bluesky’s insurance policies on lots of of issues,” she stated. “They’re hiring extra moderators, and lots of different locations aren’t moderating, or are firing moderators.”
Meta, as an example, overhauled its content moderation policies in January, ending its third-party fact-checking program.
Bluesky has grown to over 33 million customers, and even former president Barack Obama joined the platform over the weekend. However its inhabitants continues to be comparatively small in comparison with longstanding social giants like Instagram or X.
Regardless, Abughazaleh’s technique has confirmed profitable to this point. Within the first seven hours of her marketing campaign, she raised $100,000, with a mean contribution of $45.
“We’ve gotten essentially the most donations on social media from Bluesky up to now out of another platform,” Abughazaleh advised TechCrunch.
Abughazaleh can be enthusiastic in regards to the open supply nature of Bluesky. She’s making an attempt to echo that transparency on her YouTube channel, the place she plans to share movies documenting her marketing campaign expertise.
“I’m tying to be actually clear about how one can run for workplace, as a result of I really feel prefer it’s sort of this black gap that appears much more troublesome than it ought to be,” she stated.
Even when she doesn’t win a seat in Congress, she hopes that her openness about this course of will encourage different Gen Z candidates to run.
“If this marketing campaign goes as deliberate, I’d be the youngest girl elected to Congress,” she stated. “However I feel it could be cool if we had one other candidate that got here in and was even youthful than me.”
