When Kat Abughazaleh acquired laid off from her job as an extremism researcher and video producer at Media Matters final 12 months, Elon Musk personally chimed in on X to have a good time her misfortune.
“Karma is real,” Musk mentioned.
But as Abughazaleh mentioned in a video on Monday asserting her marketing campaign for Congress, she’s not afraid of standing as much as Musk, particularly as his affect on the federal authorities escalates.
Instead, 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 have ideas that I want to push, and I have a big [social media] platform,” Abughazaleh instructed TechCrunch. “I felt I didn’t want to wait around for someone to do something when I could do something right now.”
Abughazaleh constructed her on-line viewers by way of her work at Media Matters, the place she turned identified for making movies decoding the rhetoric and inaccuracies of Fox News. But when Musk sued Media Matters over an article about how X positioned commercials alongside pro-Nazi content material, the mounting authorized prices led the non-profit to put off Abughazaleh and twelve others.
Now an impartial social media creator, she has amassed over half 1,000,000 followers throughout platforms for her progressive political content material, with her largest viewers (222,000 followers) on TikTok.
“There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be able to afford housing, groceries, and healthcare with some money leftover,” she mentioned in her marketing campaign announcement. “Families should have free childcare, Social Security should be expanded, and our inalienable rights shouldn’t be dependent on who’s in power.”
Abughazaleh didn’t count on her run-ins with Musk to be relatable to the broader public. But over ten months after Musk celebrated her layoff, over 30,000 federal staff now know the sensation of shedding their jobs as a result of billionaire’s machinations.
“A lot of people in journalism, especially on this disinformation beat, have been going through kind of a trial period, or a practice run, a dry run of what Trump and Musk have been doing to the rest of the country,” she mentioned.
“We knew what was going to happen… We are upset that we’re right, but that also means that we have tools to fight back and know what’s happening and know how to handle it.”
A TikToker turned political candidate
While younger folks 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 think the big problem Democrats have is their digital strategy, and people like me and people that are younger have a better understanding [of the internet],” she mentioned. “It’s something 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. But Abughazaleh isn’t anxious. As she wrote to 1 skeptic on X, “I hope you enjoy my middle school One Direction fan blog and pictures of my cat.”
In the period of Trump — the president actually owns a social media platform the place he posts always — it’s not so taboo anymore to point out character on-line.
“We have a president that posts whatever comes to his mind at any time,” she mentioned. “I think that we’re fine with just like, having a presence from age 13.”
Given her historical past with Musk, she isn’t planning to middle 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 solely on Bluesky for an hour and a half earlier than transferring to different platforms.
“I really like Bluesky’s policies on a lot of of things,” she mentioned. “They’re hiring more moderators, and a lot of other places aren’t moderating, or are firing moderators.”
Meta, as an example, overhauled its content material moderation insurance 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. But its inhabitants continues to be comparatively small in comparison with longstanding social giants like Instagram or X.
Regardless, Abughazaleh’s technique has confirmed profitable so far. In the primary seven hours of her marketing campaign, she raised $100,000 with a median contribution of $45.
“We’ve gotten the most donations on social media from Bluesky so far out of any other platform,” Abughazaleh instructed TechCrunch.
Abughazaleh can be enthusiastic concerning the open supply nature of Bluesky. She’s attempting 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 really transparent about how to run for office, because I feel like it’s kind of this black hole that seems a lot more difficult than it should be,” she mentioned.
Even if 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 campaign goes as planned, I would be the youngest woman elected to Congress,” she mentioned. “But I think it would be cool if we had another candidate that came in and was even younger than me.”