Journalist Ken Klippenstein got banned from X for posting opposition research on then-potential VP candidate JD Vance that was reportedly hacked from the Trump campaign.
Though he strongly asserts that his ban was political, as X owner Elon Musk supports the Republican Trump-Vance ticket, Klippenstein reveals that the ostensible reason given for his ban was that he had shared personal information (addresses, etc.) in what’s called “doxxing” — considered a breach of social media protocol because that kind of information can endanger the subject.
Klippenstein denies “doxxing” Vance or anyone by linking to the PDF he received about the VP nominee, and cites a more egregious case of doxxing that did not result in the information being banned on X: the sharing of information — much of it personal — from the laptop of Hunter Biden. (In this case, Musk — once he bought the platform — actively promoted the “Twitter Files” info, rather than suspending its sharers.)
As backup, Klippenstein offers fellow journalist Lee Fang’s assessment comparing the situations of Vance and Biden. Fang asserts that X users can still link to the Biden docs on X.
The Hunter Biden laptop — which had newsworthy info that was fair game — also had personal dox info, far more than this Vance doc. The Biden laptop had bank/credit cards, personal addresses, nudity, etc. You can still link to those Biden docs on X, but Vance doc link banned?
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) September 26, 2024
Klippenstein’s share and subsequent ban are news largely because other news media outlets that were supplied with the so-called “Vance dossier” declined to publish it, citing the illegitimate way the information had been acquired and disseminated.
[NOTE: As AP reports, the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges today against “three Iranian operatives suspected of hacking Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations.”]
This current reluctance by mainstream outlets to publish the materials stirred up uncomplimentary comparisons to how those same media outlets — The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. — treated information previously acquired via hacks.
Many mainstream outlets fulsomely reported stories deriving from hacks of Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign in 2016, with some also reporting on the questionably acquired contents of Biden’s laptop during the 2020 campaign.
[NOTE: Concurring, CNN describes the holding back of the Vance info as marking “a reversal from the 2016 election, when news outlets breathlessly reported embarrassing and damaging stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Russian hackers stole a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee, publishing them on the website Wikileaks.”]
Klippenstein, making his case that the ban is more about the political than the purported principle, writes of the comparison and the result: “Yet in the case of a link to my news article, which by any definition involves much less ‘private’ information than the salacious contents of the Hunter Biden laptop, I receive a permanent ban.”
In an “experiment” to assess the weight of the political versus the protocol, Klippenstein said he later submitted a redacted version of the Vance dossier stripped of any info that might be deemed personal. His appeal was, despite the edit, still rejected, he reports.