When Kat Abughazaleh got laid off from her job as an extremism researcher and video producer at Media Matters last year, Elon Musk personally chimed in on X to celebrate her misfortune.
“Karma is real,” Musk said.
But as Abughazaleh said in a video on Monday announcing her campaign for Congress, she’s not afraid of standing up to Musk, especially as his influence on the federal government escalates.
Instead, the 26-year-old has her eye on Illinois’ Ninth District. The current representative, the 80-year-old Democrat Jan Schakowsky, was first elected to Congress before Abughazaleh was even born.
“I have ideas that I want to push, and I have a big (social media) platform,” Abughazaleh told TechCrunch. “I felt I didn’t want to wait around for someone to do something when I could do something right now.”
Abughazaleh built her online audience through her work at Media Matters, where she became known for making videos decoding the rhetoric and inaccuracies of Fox News. But when Musk sued Media Matters over an article about how X placed advertisements alongside pro-Nazi content, the mounting legal costs led the non-profit to lay off Abughazaleh and twelve others.
Now an independent social media creator, she has amassed over half a million followers across platforms for her progressive political content, with her biggest audience (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 said in her 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 expect 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 employees now know the feeling of losing their jobs due to the 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 said.
“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 young people have historically leaned liberal, Gen Z voters shifted more conservative in last year’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 said. “It’s something that we grew up with.”
Some critics may think her age is a double-edged sword since she’s young enough to have a lengthy online footprint. But Abughazaleh isn’t worried. As she wrote to one skeptic on X, “I hope you enjoy my middle school One Direction fan blog and pictures of my cat.”
In the era of Trump — the president literally owns a social media platform where he posts constantly — it’s not so taboo anymore to show personality online.
“We have a president that posts whatever comes to his mind at any time,” she said. “I think that we’re fine with just like, having a presence from age 13.”
Given her history with Musk, she isn’t planning to center X in her digital strategy. Above all other social media platforms, Abughazaleh is prioritizing Bluesky, where she has around 154,000 followers.
On Monday, for example, she posted her campaign announcement exclusively on Bluesky for an hour and a half before moving to other platforms.
“I really like Bluesky’s policies on a lot of of things,” she said. “They’re hiring more moderators, and a lot of other places aren’t moderating, or are firing moderators.”
Meta, for instance, overhauled its content moderation policies in January, ending its third-party fact-checking program.
Bluesky has grown to over 33 million users, and even former president Barack Obama joined the platform over the weekend. But its population is still relatively small compared to longstanding social giants like Instagram or X.
Regardless, Abughazaleh’s strategy has proven successful thus far. In the first seven hours of her campaign, she raised $100,000 with an average contribution of $45.
“We’ve gotten the most donations on social media from Bluesky so far out of any other platform,” Abughazaleh told TechCrunch.
Abughazaleh is also enthusiastic about the open source nature of Bluesky. She’s trying to echo that transparency on her YouTube channel, where she plans to share videos documenting her campaign experience.
“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 said.
Even if she doesn’t win a seat in Congress, she hopes that her openness about this process will inspire other gen Z candidates to run.
“If this campaign goes as planned, I would be the youngest woman elected to Congress,” she said. “But I think it would be cool if we had another candidate that came in and was even younger than me.”
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