Never Back Down, the top Super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign, has been suspended from X.
The suspension occurred sometime on Wednesday morning, just hours before the first Republican presidential primary debate was set to take place.
It's #GOPDebate day and the @nvrbackdown24 account was just suspended for no apparent reason.
What is going on @elonmusk? pic.twitter.com/d9Ak1cz3DY
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) August 23, 2023
It was not immediately clear what was behind the suspension of the account. Since the news broke, Elon Musk has been tagged by numerous high-profile accounts asking for answers. So far, none have been provided.
Needless to say, having a candidate’s PAC suspended from X on what is essentially its biggest day of the campaign so far is a major problem and needs to be addressed without any further delay. This is the kind of censorship that used to happen a lot under the old Twitter regime, with it often being blamed on the algorithm.
There are several possible reasons for an account to be suspended. Did this happen because of something X decided something Never Back Down did actually violated the TOS? Or did this happen because one of DeSantis’ opponents organized a mass-reporting campaign? That has been an issue during the current cycle, and if that’s the explanation here, not only does X need to fix the problem, but representatives need to let it be known that they won’t tolerate such manipulation of the system.
Hopefully, this will be rectified soon and some kind of reasonable explanation will be provided for why it happened and how it won’t happen again in the future.
UPDATE:
Never Back Down’s account has been restored. The explanation given was that the system “incorrectly” labeled the account as “spam.” Representatives for the PAC are asking X to answer whether they were the target of pro-Trump bot farms running a mass-reporting campaign.
Given their celebration, we have asked @X @elonmusk to disclose whether these Trump-backed accounts and their affiliated bot network have recently engaged in mass reporting against the @NvrBackDown24 account in order to manipulate X's rules. https://t.co/RrmEYKq1sO pic.twitter.com/Nx1MpQ6K6n
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) August 23, 2023
