Following Kamala Harris’s announcement that she is running for president, users on Elon’s Musk X (formerly known as Twitter) found themselves banned from following the vice president’s political campaign account.
When users went to follow @KamalaHQ, the official rapid response page for Harris’s campaign, they were greeted with a message that said they had reached their “limit” and could not follow any more accounts at this time.
This message usually is deployed to prevent spam or “rate limiting,” for instance if one account is following hundreds of others. But it seems that the Harris account is the one being limited, rather than the users’.
An initial search for KamalaHQ on The New Republic’s X account also found that the campaign account is limited. The campaign account showed up in repeated subsequent searches, seeming to suggest the issue is being resolved.
This all may look a little suspicious considering Elon Musk’s growing relationship with Donald Trump. Just last week, Musk promised to donate $45 million a month to help Trump get reelected.
In the past several days, Musk has continued to post right-wing and pro-Trump memes. Following Joe Biden stepping down, Musk retweeted former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy saying, “We’re not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system.”
Musk has also attacked Harris more directly. “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of power,” a QAnon-linked influencer wrote with Biden’s resignation letter attached. “The Democratic elite, corporate media, and billionaire donors successfully pressured the candidate chosen by Democratic primary voters to drop out because he’s down in the polls and losing.”
Musk reposted the statement, simply writing, “Exactly.”
On Sunday, Musk also tweeted out a video of Harris saying her pronouns and describing her appearance for accessibility and captioned the post, “Imagine 4 years of this…”
