Twitter Suspends 'White Dudes For Harris' Account After $4 Million Fundraising Call
The social platform X, formerly Twitter, suspended a “White Dudes for Harris” account following a fundraising video call that attracted nearly 200,000 supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris’ run for the Oval Office.
The account, @dudes4harris, was suspended Monday night for violating X rules “due to a user report,” according to a screenshot from Mike Nellis, one of the account’s operators. As of Tuesday morning, @dudes4harris was still suspended and “permanently in read-only mode.”
“We scared @elonmusk and @DonaldJTrumpJr so much tonight they suspended our account and won’t let us back in,” Nellis wrote on his own X page, using the handles of X owner Elon Musk and the son of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. “These guys are running scared of the success we’ve had tonight, but we’re not going to quit.”
Celebrities like Jeff Bridges, Josh Groban, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lance Bass, among others, joined the White Dudes for Harris fundraising call, which raised $4 million for Harris’ Democratic campaign. On X, the White Dudes for Harris account describes itself as “Just a few dudes who support Kamala Harris.”
When HuffPost asked for comment, X sent an automated reply: “Busy now, please check back later.”
Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and then renamed it X, was previously accused of silencing detractors after his platform suspended the accounts of several journalists who wrote critically about him; their accounts were later reinstated. Musk calls himself a proponent of free speech, but X has sued organizations like Media Matters for America and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which have studied X and published reports about the social media site. The suit against the latter group has since been dismissed.
Earlier this month, Musk announced that he was “fully” endorsing Trump in the 2024 presidential race. And over the weekend, Musk called Harris an “extinctionist” after she said she understands why young people may be hesitant to start families.