Did Elon Musk Tamper With AOC’s Twitter Feed After She Criticized Him?

Another day on Elon Musk’s Twitter is going about as smoothly as we all predicted! On Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) appeared to accuse Musk of deliberately tampering with her Twitter account in retaliation for the Bronx Congresswoman criticizing his plan to make verified users pay $8 per month earlier this week.

“Yo @elonmusk while I have your attention, why should people pay $8 just for their app to get bricked when they say something you don’t like?” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a Thursday tweet attached to a screenshot of the seemingly nonfunctional notifications tab of her Twitter app. “This is what my app has looked like ever since my tweet upset you yesterday. What’s good? Doesn’t seem very free speechy to me ”

On Wednesday evening, Ocasio-Cortez raised similar issues: “[M]y twitter mentions/notifications conveniently aren’t working tonight, so I was informed via text that I seem to have gotten under a certain billionaire’s skin ,” she wrote. “Just a reminder that money will never [buy] your way out of insecurity, folks.”

The Congresswoman’s concerns came after she and Musk spent most of Wednesday sparring, after a characteristically thin-skinned Musk took issue with Ocasio-Cortez’s brutal appraisal of his verification payment plan.

Musk has, since, inexplicably shared a series of geriatric memes equating his plan to force public figures to pay for an essential, bare-minimum security feature with silly liberal consumers merely buying things like coffee. In a direct response to Ocasio-Cortez’s critiques, on Wednesday evening, he tweeted a screenshot of reasonably priced, $58 campaign merchandise from her website paired with the thinking emoji.

It’s really not that deep, Elon! Union-made garments produced by workers who are paid a living wage are going to cost more than $5—and that is, in fact, not at all the same as making public figures and journalists pay $8 per month to not be impersonated and ward off the inevitable spread of fake news while creating content for your site.

Or, as Ocasio-Cortez put it:

As some have already pointed out, Musk’s Tesla is now the largest non-union car manufacturer in the nation. His factory workers are paid some of the lowest wages in the auto-industry. More recently, Musk has proudly threatened to lay off 75 percent of Twitter’s workforce as we enter the holiday season. But pay him $8 per month and he’ll restore “power to the people!”

Circling back to Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns about Musk possibly messing with her Twitter feed, the issues she’s facing could possibly just be a glitch—we’ve all had technical problems with our feeds before. Twitter’s communications team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Jezebel on the matter. Nor did Ocasio-Cortez’s reelection campaign, when asked for further details about the glitches plaguing the Congresswoman’s app.

In any case, Musk retaliating against a critic would hardly be out of character. In 2016, Musk canceled a journalist’s order for a Tesla after said journalist publicly criticized him. And in 2018, when a professional cave diver who heroically rescued children trapped in a cave in Thailand rejected Musk’s idiotic pitch for Tesla-made submarines, Musk called the cave diver a “pedo guy” to his millions of followers.

There are important concerns as Musk reportedly hacks away at Twitter’s content moderation team ahead of next week’s election. Hopefully, all of these headaches will be worth it when Musk’s $8 verification plan inevitably blows up in his face.