In the final days leading up to the U.S. presidential election, Elon Musk’s X suspended the official account of a progressive-donor-backed ballot initiative called SwapYourVote. The volunteer-run website tries to get third-party voters in swing states to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris, matching them with Democrats in solidly blue states who agree to vote for the candidate of the swing state voter’s choosing. The X account was reinstated around 11 am PT on Tuesday after being suspended two days earlier, on Sunday, when X labeled it as spam.
“The account was caught by one of our automated spam defenses and has been reinstated,” said an X spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch on Tuesday. X’s platform manipulation and spam policy prohibits using automation to amplify information.
Vote swapping, also called co-voting or vote pairing, is a controversial practice that dates back to America’s 2000 presidential election, where more than 36,000 Ralph Nader and Al Gore supporters traded votes.
So far, SwapYourVote says nearly 12,000 voters have signed up to participate in the 2024 election. While that’s a small percentage of America’s total voters, it could have a meaningful impact in several key swing states – such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona – which are often decided by a few thousand votes.
SwapYourVote organizers are unclear on what they did to break the policy in the first place.
“We still don’t know what happened,” said a SwapYourVote spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch. “Maybe we got caught up by automated spam filters because the account was new and we posted a lot? It still feels suspicious that this will happen so close to the election,” this person added.
Content moderation on X has been somewhat inconsistent leading up to the 2024 presidential election, despite Musk’s claimed goal to turn X into a free speech platform. Clemson University recently uncovered a network of 686 AI-powered bots operating political influence campaigns on X, many of which spread pro-Trump or pro-GOP propaganda. In September, X suspended a journalist’s account who shared leaked vetting documents for JD Vance. It later blocked links to the leaked document, citing the content as harmful.
When visiting a link to the X account for @SwapYourVote on Tuesday morning, users received a message reading “Account suspended” and “X suspends accounts which violate the X Rules.” SwapYourVote’s social media accounts on other platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, were still active and accessible on Tuesday.
