X prevents users from posting links to newsletters containing hacked documents purporting to be research by the Trump campaign on vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Journalist Ken Klippenstein, who wrote the newsletter, was suspended from the platform. I searched for posts with links to newsletters and found nothing.
Screenshot of a search for a link to Ken Klippenstein’s newsletter. Searching for “No results for https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-the-jd-vance-dossier”
The document is believed to have come from Iran’s hacking of the Trump campaign. Other news organizations also received information from the hack but declined to publish it. Klippenstein said in his newsletter that a source named “Robert” with an AOL email address provided him with the documents. It contained what appeared to be Vance’s full name, address, and part of his social security number.
KlipNews, the newsletter’s X account, wrote, “Ken Klippenstein has been banned from Twitter for publishing personal information against Twitter’s rules.”
Before being acquired by Elon Musk, Twitter had a hacked content policy, but that page is no longer available. a Musk Previous version policydated 2019, states that posting or linking to hacked content is prohibited. Under the policy, links to New York Post articles about Hunter Biden, the current president’s son, were prohibited. However, in October 2020, following an outcry over how Twitter handled the Post article, the company changed its policy and said it would no longer block hacked content. “Blocking the URL directly was a mistake, and we have updated our policies and enforcement to correct it,” his CEO Jack Dorsey wrote at the time.
Musk was among those unhappy with the Post’s decision to ban links to the article. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization that published a true story was clearly extremely inappropriate,” Musk wrote in April 2022 about the decision regarding the story. He also brought in former Rolling Stone critic Matt Taibbi to review internal documents documenting Twitter’s response. Decided. (In the process of tweeting his conclusions, Mr. Taibbi revealed the email addresses of Mr. Dorsey and Congressman Ro Khanna.)
It’s unclear why X is blocking Krippenstein’s article, but three members of The Verge’s staff tried unsuccessfully to post a link to Krippenstein’s newsletter. I received an error message saying “This request cannot be completed because this link has been identified as potentially harmful by his X or our partners.” Visit our Help Center for more information. ” I emailed the company for comment.
Screenshot of my test post