Politics

Reported cooperation between Musk’s X and Trump’s campaign underscores right-wing hypocrisy

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

Reported cooperation between Musk’s X and Trump’s campaign underscores right-wing hypocrisy

A report by The New York Times on Elon Musk’s fervent support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign includes a bombshell detail that undermines right-wingers’ conspiratorial claims about Hunter Biden and anti-conservative bias on social media.

Conservatives have been kvetching for years about so-called collusion by the federal government with Big Tech, which they baselessly claim was a factor in Trump’s loss in 2020. In Republicans’ telling, the internal choices of some social media companies to moderate conspiratorial content about data — some of it pornographic — dubiously retrieved from an old Hunter Biden laptop amounts to a full-blown conspiracy.

Never mind that this purported government collusion would have occurred under the Trump administration — right-wingers have gone all in on the bogus claimwhich has been promoted by Elon Musk.

But according to the Times, the Trump campaign and Musk’s social platform, X, recently engaged in conduct remarkably similar to what conservatives have been crying about for years. Per the report:

The relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.

The Times’ anecdote involves independent journalist Ken Klippenstein’s controversy l suspension from X after he shared a link to his website, where he had published hacked opposition research that the Trump campaign compiled on JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. (The Times’ report has not been independently verified by BLN or NBC News.)

Because we’re talking about Republicans here, and they’ve already shown their rank hypocrisy when it comes to Musk’s platformI’m certain that the conservatives controlling the House won’t be holding any hearings on Musk and Trump, as they did to promote bogus allegations about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But what the Times is reporting is far more egregious.

Twitter in 2020 was not in the bag for any particular candidate. Musk’s X, on the other hand, is an unmistakabl y pro-Trump propaganda outlet operated by a bigoted megalomaniac. And the Times appears to have just revealed a way that Musk and company are manipulating the platform to help Trump win.

Ya’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He’s a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

Politics

World Cup fuels ticketing reform demands

Published

10 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Demands are growing for a political reckoning over ticket scams at the World Cup — and beyond.

The National Independent Venue Association and Fan Alliance, organizations representing and advocating for entertainment venues and artists respectively, sent a joint letter to Congress on Thursday, calling on lawmakers to ban speculative and ghost tickets, cases where resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

The letter — addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — includes nearly two dozen accounts of fans who say they were scammed out of thousands of dollars trying to get tickets to the World Cup, which began last week. The groups are also asking fans to share their own stories with elected officials via the Fix the Tix Fan Action Center that launched last week.

“Every one of these stories erodes the public’s faith that consumers should and will be protected from fraud,” NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker and Fan Alliance founder Donald Cohen wrote. “We urge Congress to work with us to prevent fraud like this in the future and finally enact ticket resale consumer protections that will protect Americans and ensure affordability.”

The letter flagged fans like Dacy Gillespie, who bought World Cup tickets for her sons on Christmas, only to learn on match day — months later — that the seller couldn’t deliver them. And Skylie Shore, who Parker and Cohen said spent well over $6,000 on tickets to the Scotland-Haiti match on June 13, but was forced to wait outside the stadium because she couldn’t access them as fans marched in on gameday.

“These examples reveal a consistent pattern: consumer deception, speculative ticket sales, and broken-hearted American families at the hands of resale ticketing companies like StubHub,” Parker and Cohen wrote.

In a statement, StubHub spokesperson Jack Sterne said that the platform does not allow speculative ticket sales, and blamed FIFA for users’ difficulty in accessing their tickets.

“We understand that attending the World Cup represents a significant investment in time and money, and we take our responsibility to every fan who books through our platform seriously,” Sterne said in a statement. “Many of the issues fans are facing trace back to the event organizer’s technology infrastructure, newly announced transfer restrictions, and a new app that was launched just a month ago.”

In response, FIFA said in a statement that the organization “can guarantee the validity and delivery of tickets purchased through its official platforms” and that FIFA.com/tickets “is the official ticket sales channel” for the tournament.

NIVA and Fan Alliance are urging congressional leadership to place universal price-gouging limits on ticket resale, enact stringent fines on perpetrators and a violation-reporting mechanism for ticket scams, and require secondary ticketing platforms to produce data on ticket fulfillment and consumer complaints.

The groups are not the only ones monitoring for evidence of shady ticket practices. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued a consumer guidance in advance of the tournament, urging match-goers to beware of fraud and promising to hold offenders accountable. And the FBI in May put out a public service announcement, warning fans against purchasing tickets on copycat websites modeled on FIFA’s.

“With the World Cup coming to Kansas City, excitement is high and, unfortunately, so is the potential for fraud,” Hanaway said in her statement. “Missourians should be able to enjoy this once-in-a-generation event without fear of being deceived. My office will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit our families, and we stand ready to assist anyone who encounters suspicious activity.”