Dark Money Wants Your Algorithm And Your Vote

Days before the primary, congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh is the target of a smear campaign in Illinois

A secret political group is offering at least $1,500 to influencers to sway the outcome of Tuesday’s election in Illinois.

A group called “Democracy Unmuted” is quietly paying influencers to run a heavily scripted, negative campaign focused almost entirely on one candidate: 26‑year‑old progressive Democrat Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian‑American journalist who has spent years tracking how the right weaponizes disinformation. When I interviewed her months ago, Kat told me she once watched Fox News “every night” so her audience wouldn’t have to. Now she’s being targeted by a campaign that looks like a real-time test of the very tactics she spent year exposing.

This is not “voter education.” It’s a warning for how outside money can buy our algorithms and our elections.

How the smear campaign is organized

The Democracy Unmuted brief, which is available online, reads like a content marketing pitch, not a campaign memo.

Influencers are offered a flat fee of around $1,500, according to MS NOW, with a four‑step “content structure” laid out in bullets: hook, “fact,” reflection, call to action. Creators are told to be “themselves” and speak in their “regular voice.” The word “authentic” appears several times, as if the document is trying to cover up the fact that the talking points are being entirely fed to them.

The “facts” they’re supposed to share are almost all about Kat: her family background, her partner, where she lives, and whether her campaign office doubling as a mutual‑aid hub is “performative.” The brief instructs creators to ask their audience, “Is she running to be a civil servant, or is the district just a canvas for her personal brand?” The tone is framed as concern but the script is a negative ad campaign.

The geography, too, is engineered. Creators are told to repeat “IL‑09, Rogers Park, Skokie, Evanston, Glenview” in audio and captions, not to connect with those communities but to trick the algorithm. The district becomes a target for this content to land, not a place with real people who will be impacted by the outcome of this election.

The most revealing part is that every post must be reviewed and approved before it goes live. The creators are told to “be you” and then someone else approves their work and signs their checks. That’s not grassroots organizing. It’s influencer‑marketing applied to democracy.

Who is behind this

If this campaign were actually about voter awareness, you’d expect some basic transparency about who’s running it. But “Democracy Unmuted” is a shell. Funny that the people accusing Kat of being a performative opportunist are hiding in the shadows.

The website appears to have been registered just a few weeks ago. There’s no staff list, no donor disclosure, no clear record of prior civic work. No Federal Election Commission (FCC) filings show up under that name, which means we don’t know who is funding this campaign, how much they’re spending, or who exactly is being paid to post about Kat.

Creators who asked directly have reportedly been told the money comes from “Democratic organizations you would be proud of,” with no names, no links, and no obligation to disclose. The same person coordinating this campaign, Matt Anthes, through his digital marketing agency, Upstart Factory, is also the founder of an AI‑driven “advocacy technology platform” called Advocators. Advocators has worked with several recent campaigns like Governors Mikie Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger, and even one of Kat’s opponents, Daniel Biss.

It’s unclear who exactly is paying Upstart Factory to execute this campaign. In a primary where a few thousand votes can decide who represents a safe blue seat, undisclosed money whispering negative narratives into targeted feeds is a direct attack on democracy.

Kat’s story vs. their narrative

This is where the dishonesty of the smear really comes through ..

The Democracy Unmuted brief instructs creators to frame Kat as hiding her past, her class background, and the fact that she didn’t live in IL‑09 for most of her life. But when I interviewed Kat, she volunteered all of that information in excruciating detail. She talked about growing up a “Reagan Republican,” starting a Young America’s Foundation club in high school, and she recounted her own political evolution with a sense of self-awareness and also embarrassment. “Maybe Marco Rubio is the answer,” she said in high school. She described the moment a close friend couldn’t afford college despite receiving a full ride as the moment she realized, “Oh, maybe Ronald Reagan isn’t right about everything.”

She also told me there’s a sentence in her planner from February 3rd that just says, “Fuck it. Guess I’m going to run for Congress.” She had been watching the Democratic response to the right fall apart and she knew that the disinformation we saw in 2024 was just a “dry run” for what Republicans are doing to the government. She said couldn’t sit by while the system that had already hurt her professional community was being weaponized against the country. That’s not a secret origin story. It’s a story she has told over and over in interviews, livestreams, and videos.

When you really know Kat’s story, the work she’s done, and then you read this brief by Democracy Unmuted, you will notice the irony. The candidate who spent years documenting how the right manufactures outrage and fear is now the subject of a professionally produced fear campaign aimed at a small number of voters. The people paying for these posts are counting on viewers never actually listening to Kat speak for herself.

Mutual‑aid is a bad thing

The smear also leans hard on the idea that her campaign office doubling as a mutual‑aid hub is performative rather than real. The brief mocks it as more “self‑promotional” than community‑driven, asking, “Why not connect with the already existing network?”

But in our conversation, Kat described a grandmother who came into a backpack drive “visibly scared,” asking if she needed to show ID and whether she was allowed to take backpacks for all five of her grandchildren. The staff told her, “No paperwork, no questions; there’s plenty to go around.” That’s the opposite of the kind of tightly controlled, “approved by legal” charity operation that the brief is implying. It’s the kind of thing you do if you actually believe people shouldn’t have to prove how poor they are to deserve basic dignity.

When I traveled to Chicago to interview Kat (on my own dime), i was in awe of the system she and her team had set up. The space was warm, welcoming and had plenty of canned food, dog food, feminine hygiene products, coats and other supplies for anyone who wanted to come in and ask for help. And they did! I was there for less than two hours and we had to stop our recording multiple times so her team could answer the door for neighbors passing by.

If all of that is a “prop,” it’s a prop that leaves kids with school supplies, seniors with coats, and families with groceries. The people funding the influencer campaign would rather you never hear that story at all.

Why this matters

You don’t have to be in Illinois, or even a Kat supporter, to see why this is so important.

If undisclosed money can quietly rent the trust that influencers have earned with their audiences, then every race for a “safe” seat will become a playground for these dark money groups.

If every alternative candidate who rattles the establishment can be quietly discredited by a small, well‑targeted influencer campaign, then our elections will no longer be about policy or even humanity, they’re just about who can afford to run this sort of covert operation.

Democracy Unmuted is trying to sell a story about Kat Abughazaleh as a mystery candidate hiding her past. The reality is the opposite: she’s been unusually open about her political evolution, her family, and her decision to run. The only people behaving like they’re hiding something are the ones paying others to whisper about her from behind a curtain.