J.D. Vance

Liz Wolfe | 9.27.2024 9:42 AM

Vance dossier: On Thursday, X suspended the account of Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist who formerly wrote for The Intercept, due to his sharing of the Donald Trump campaign's vetting dossier on J.D. Vance.

The hefty document was allegedly obtained through an Iranian cyberattack/hack of the campaign's confidential files. Last month, Microsoft reported "that Iran-backed hackers had targeted a high-ranking political campaign official via a spear-phishing email" (per Axios); it came to light that the high-ranking political campaign official was affiliated with Team Trump as the documents began to circulate to major publications.

The dossier published on Klippenstein's Substack and shared to X contained what appears to be Vance's home address and phone number. Sharing the dossier may violate X's hacked materials policy, which was altered in October 2020 (following outcry related to Twitter suppressing the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story, originally reported by the New York Post) but continues to prohibit sharing hacked materials that reveal personal information.

"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance's physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number," said an X spokesman. But links to the dossier were also banned, contra X's changed policy which says that links should be labeled as hacked materials but that they should not be banned outright. ("Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix," wrote then-CEO Jack Dorsey in October 2020.) Some people who shared links to, or screenshots from, the Vance dossier—even parts which contained no sensitive information—were locked out of their accounts. Case in point:

My colleague @EricBoehm87 posted a single screen shot from the Vance........

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