Phony Starks’ Xitter Suspends Journalist For Publishing JD Vance Dossier
Written by djfrosty on September 27, 2024
Source: Matt Cardy / Getty
An independent journalist, Ken Klippenstein, was suspended from X, formerly Twitter, for publishing a dossier on JD Vance on the platform.
On Thursday (Sept. 26), an independent journalist was suspended from X, formerly Twitter, having his account locked. The reason given by the platform’s safety account for the suspension was “for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. [J.D.] Vance’s physical address and the majority of his social security number.” The journalist Ken Klippenstein published a PDF, which is an opposition research file on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate earlier in the day.
Klippenstein, who formerly wrote for The Intercept, disclosed why he published the Vance dossier in his Substack newsletter. “If the document had been hacked by some ‘anonymous’ like hacker group, the news media would be all over it,” he wrote, referring to other news outlets being reluctant to publish the document despite having had access to it since June. “I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.”
The suspension also extends to the social media platform flagging the link and automatically blocking anyone who attempts to post it. The decision comes after the platform updated policies on “hacked materials” in the wake of stories concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop appearing on X in 2020. Those stories would be published, but links within them blocked as a result.
The 271-page document does contain unredacted personal information about Vance. At least three major news outlets and other independent journalists had received the dossier but didn’t publish it, later citing a lack of anything newsworthy to be found in it. Their decisions drew criticism from others who cited the media frenzy when emails from Hilary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign were leaked and then published wildly a short time before the election.
The Trump campaign has alleged that the document leak was the result of their servers being hacked by the Iranian government, occurring in the same period in June as confirmed by three U.S. intelligence agencies. Iran’s vice president for strategic affairs denied the claims to NBC News, saying that “the government and official agencies of Iran have not hacked anybody. People working for us haven’t, either.”