With the November elections approaching, millions of Americans’ Facebook feeds are being flooded with advertisements that stoke anti-transgender sentiment and claim socialists are out to dismantle the country “piece by piece, until there’s nothing left to vote for.”
The ads come from a political action committee created by the owner of another social media platform: Elon Musk.
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The social media blitz from America PAC attacks high-profile Democratic candidates, including Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who is running a closely watched campaign for the U.S. Senate. Other advertisements, meanwhile, bolster Republican candidates, including Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, described as having spent “years getting things done.”
“‘GOD IS NON-BINARY,’ SAYS TALARICO,” claims one of the ads, which has racked up nearly 500,000 impressions on Facebook since it began appearing in feeds on Sunday. “He believes there are six genders. He’s TOO radical for Texas.”
The campaign offers a window into how monied interests — in this case, the globe’s richest human — flood social media with political ads designed to sway public sentiment, and ultimately, their votes.
For Musk, the owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the ads represent just a fraction of his spending to sway voters come November. Musk has reportedly authorized America PAC to shell out more than $100 million this year to help elect Republicans in at least eight races.
But the ads, which direct Facebook users to a website called “Votesafe,” are about more than capturing votes. They are part of a coordinated bid to collect users’ personal data — including their social media behaviors.
While the advertisements purportedly provide Americans with the information they need to “vote with confidence,” a new investigation reveals the Votesafe portal is a front designed to siphon peoples’ personal data to Musk’s “business partners.”
‘Scapegoating LGBTQ+ Americans’
Musk’s voter registration portal has been accused for years of amassing data about people without actually helping them register to vote.
But the latest investigation, which independent journalist Judd Legum wrote for his Substack, Popular Information, reveals new changes to America PAC’s privacy policy. The changes authorize the site to share or sell users’ personal information, including whether someone is registered to vote — and their top picks come Election Day.
Elevating the portal into people’s Facebook feeds are 39 active America PAC ads, which went live between last Saturday and Tuesday. The posts are included in Meta’s Ad Library, which seeks to provide transparency around paid social media posts related to “social issues, elections or politics.”
Most of the ads have multiple versions using what Meta calls “dynamic products” that allow advertisers to upload multiple image and text combinations and “platform-specific preferences so our system can automatically create the right combination for the audience” and deliver targeted ads.
The campaign is poised to cost America PAC as much as $200,000, according to a Straight Arrow analysis of the Meta ad transparency platform.
The ads have already had a vast reach on Facebook, including the ad against Talarico that raked up nearly 500,000 impressions. Meta defines impressions as “the number of times an ad was on a screen, which may include multiple views by the same people.”
The ad claims that Talarico “believes there are six genders,” parroting a conservative talking point attacking the candidate’s masculinity that an LGBTQ Nation fact-check concluded is “half true.” Talarico was referring to the fact that sex and gender are not binary, according to the outlet, “referring to intersex chromosome variations, not that there are six genders.”
Across the 39 ad campaigns, the videos and posts have generated as many as 2.9 million impressions, according to an analysis of the Meta ad library.
“Texans know b——- when we see it,” according to one anti-Talarico ad. It claims he “voted to spend our tax dollars on sex change surgeries for kids.”
Talarico backtracked this week on previous positions supporting gender-affirming care for minors and transgender student-athlete participation in girls’ sports. His campaign told The New York Times that Musk’s ads misrepresented his positions. JT Ennis, a Talarico campaign spokesperson, said “billionaire-backed dark money groups” are scared of the “movement we’re building to fix this broken, corrupt political system.”
Another ad takes aim at Sherrod Brown, a Democrat running for Senate in Ohio, two years after losing a re-election bid. The ad claims that voters gave Brown the boot in 2024 because he “voted to allow men to enter women’s sports and locker rooms.”
The Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit LGBQ-rights group, blasted America PAC’s anti-trans ads in Alaska, Ohio, Texas and Iowa as a bid by Musk to distract from his performance as a member of the Trump administration for a brief period last year. Musk previously served as head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, a quasi-agency charged with cutting federal spending.
“Elon Musk is scapegoating LGBTQ+ Americans to distract voters from the cuts he made and the chaos he has caused,” Ramiro Sarmiento, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a press release. “Trans people aren’t the reason cancer research has stalled, rural hospitals have closed, or food recalls are everywhere — that’s all because of Elon’s cuts. Like always, Elon is trying to save his bought and paid for politicians. But American voters won’t be fooled.”
America PAC didn’t respond to emails from Straight Arrow seeking comment.
‘Bought and paid for’
The rights of trans people are just one of America PAC’s tentpole issues this election cycle.
The PAC aims to bolster candidates focused on “secure borders,” according to its website, which praised a Supreme Court decision in June that upheld a federal policy allowing the government to turn away asylum seekers before they reach the U.S.-Mexico border. It also seeks to support “sensible spending,” with its website offering praise to the Trump administration’s decision in March to freeze some $200 million in federal Medicaid payments to Minnesota due to alleged fraud in the state’s public health insurance programs.
The rise of socialism within the Democratic Party, another America PAC ad claims, is “a direct threat to America.”
“Troy Jackson stands with the radicals,” warns an ad targeting Maine state Sen. Troy Jackson, the Democrat challenging Collins for her seat in the Senate. “If we elect Troy Jackson, the socialists will take over and transform our country forever.”
In response, Jackson wrote on X — the Musk-owned social media platform — that he doesn’t care about billionaires “and that’s why they’re dumping all that money in here.” Through Collins, Jackson claimed, Musk “continues to get the government he bought and paid for.”
Under Musk’s lead, DOGE faced criticism for its efforts to build a vast, centralized database with Americans’ personal information to track down undocumented immigrants and investigate suspected fraud.
The Trump administration claimed the effort saved $110 billion, but a federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last month offered a vastly different assessment of the effort, which led to mass layoffs of government employees and gave Musk operatives access to financial records and other data about millions of Americans.
The GAO concluded that DOGE was unable to substantiate 96% of its purported savings.
Through the Votesafe website, the Popular Information investigation reveals Musk appears to be building a new data collection system — one that documents “every link you click” and “every page you look at.”
Round out your reading
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