Americans For Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) has withdrawn support for Elon Musk’s X/Twitter after the platform censored its ad promoting a new website and forum section aimed at documenting noncitizen and illegal migrant voters.
On April 17, ALIPAC launched a press release announcing the creation of NonCitizenVoters.com, a website dedicated to collecting documentation of noncitizen and illegal migrant voters. The purpose of the site is to assist media, lawmakers, candidates, and voters in addressing this acknowledged national issue. However, the X/Twitter ad promoting the press release and information, which quickly gained 44,000 views, was censored and halted by Elon Musk’s company.
LUKEVILLE, ARIZONA – DECEMBER 07: Immigrants from the west African nation of Guinea strike a celebratory pose after successfully crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on December 07, 2023 in Lukeville, Arizona. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
William Gheen, spokesman for ALIPAC, said in a post: “Today we are releasing Twitter’s emails to us declaring that felony-committing noncitizen and illegal migrant voters are a ‘protected group’ on X and promoting documentation and sources proving we have a system-wide problem with this form of election fraud is considered ‘hate speech / hateful content’ which they will block!”
The release and post was flooded by comments on both X/Twitter and Facebook, claiming that anyone concerned about the issue of illegal migrant voters was lying and a racist. ALIPAC notified a national network of activists and encouraged them to respond to the trolls with links and source citations.
ALIPAC believes that many of the commenters are online trolls, referring to them as “China Trolls” or “Laughing Trolls.” According to ALIPAC, these trolls are hired by unknown paymasters and attack people in groups, use the same language, and target accounts that have low visibility and are shadowbanned, such as @ALIPAC. These trolls also appear to have a poor understanding of basic English and the issues at hand, according to ALIPAC. They respond very quickly to certain content, which suggests that they are searching platforms to find targeted content about immigration, Ukraine, and other related topics.
When ALIPAC contested the censorship of their ad by X/Twitter and inquired why it was censored, Twitter initially stated: “Our team manually reviewed your content and confirmed that it violates our Hateful Content policy…Hate speech or advocacy against a protected group, individual, or organization.” However, when asked where it was written that people of many races violating American election laws and committing felonies by voting as noncitizens are a protected group, Twitter changed its stance and claimed that the ad was targeting countries not permitted for advertising Political Content.
ALIPAC, a registered Political Action Committee, responded by citing a recent article in the Guardian stating that Twitter allows U.S. political candidates and parties to advertise. They asked for clarification on whether the current Twitter / X Political Content Policy prohibits their political advertising in the United States or if a change needs to be made to allow their ads to run only in the United States.
Twitter did not respond and instead reiterated their claim that the ad violates their “Hate Speech” rules.
Read more at ALIPAC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.