X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter that contains a hacked document purporting to be Trump campaign research on vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist who wrote the newsletter, Ken Klippenstein, has been suspended from the platform. Nothing comes up when searching for posts that contain a link to the newsletter.
The document allegedly comes from an Iranian hack of the Trump campaign. Although other news outlets received information about the hack, they declined to publish it. Klippenstein says in his newsletter that he was offered the document by a source named “Robert” with an AOL email address. It appears to contain Vance's full name, addresses and part of his Social Security number.
X said in a post on his security account that Klippenstein “has been temporarily suspended for violating our rules regarding the publication of unredacted private personal information.” The company did not comment on why links to Klippenstein's article were blocked. The X account for Klippenstein's newsletter confirmed the reasoning for the ban. “Ken Klippenstein was banned from Twitter for posting private information in violation of its rules,” KlipNews wrote.
Twitter had a policy regarding hacked materials before Elon Musk took over – but the site is no longer available. A Pre-Musk version of the policydated 2019, stated that posting or linking to hacked content was prohibited. This policy links to a story by The New York Post about Hunter Biden, the son of the sitting president, were banned. But in October 2020, Twitter changed its policies and said it would no longer block hacked materials after an outcry over how the company handled it post Story. “Blocking URLs directly was wrong and we have updated our policies and enforcement actions to address the issue,” then-CEO Jack Dorsey wrote.
Musk was one of the people unhappy with the decision to ban links Posts Story. “Suspending a major news organization's Twitter account for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk wrote in April 2022 about the decision on the story. He even invited former members Rolling Stone Expert Matt Taibbi is said to be examining internal documents that show how Twitter handled the decision. (While Taibbi tweeted his conclusions, he revealed the email addresses of Dorsey and Rep. Ro Khanna.)
It is unclear why X is blocking Klippenstein's story, but there are attempts by three employees to do so The edge Posting links to Klippenstein's newsletter failed. We received error messages that read: “We cannot complete this request because this link has been identified as potentially harmful by X or our partners.” Visit our Help Center to learn more.”
Update, September 26th: Added comment from X's security account.