JD Vance speaks during a campaign event in Asheboro, N.C., on Aug. 21, 2024. (Chuck Burton/AP)
Elon Musk’s X suspended an independent journalist on Thursday for sharing an unverified dossier on vice presidential candidate JD Vance containing his personal information, with the billionaire CEO calling the spread of the document “one of the most egregious, evil doxing actions we’ve ever seen.”
The incident hearkened to another moment, just weeks before the 2020 election, when the social media platform took the unusual step of restricting a news article based on documents purported to be lifted from the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The company, then Twitter, initially cited its policies against sharing hacked materials in doing so but later similarly blamed the publication behind it for disclosing private information.
Musk’s reaction to that episode was notably different. Top Republicans and the tech billionaire railed against the decision regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop as an attempt to suppress a potentially compromising story and alter the campaign. The mogul later bought the company in a bid partly to prevent such acts, vowing that he would run the company as a “free speech absolutist.”
But content moderation experts said the two incidents bear a striking resemblance, highlighting the thorny calls social networks have been forced to make when facing dubiously sourced or potentially revealing materials in a polarized political environment.
Thursday’s incident unfolded after reporter Ken Klippenstein shared the 271-page dossier in a newsletter posted on X, claiming the contents were a vetting document on Vance purportedly created by former president Donald Trump’s campaign. Several news organizations, including The Washington Post, reported being offered in August what appears to have been a version of the Vance dossier by an anonymous source, and the Justice Department on Friday charged three men with carrying out the alleged hack and leak against the Trump campaign on behalf of the Iranian government.
Within a few hours of Klippenstein posting the dossier, X suspended his account. Some other users reported having their accounts locked after sharing his newsletter. In an emailed statement, an X spokesman said 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.” The company declined to confirm whether it was blocking users from sharing links to the newsletter.
Klippenstein disputed X’s rationale for the suspension in a blog post, saying that he never published any private information directly on X — only links to the document — and that the information contained in the dossier is “readily available to anyone to buy.” Klippenstein also jabbed Musk for the decision to boot him, despite Musk’s claim to be a free speech warrior.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, confirmed Friday that it would also block users from sharing Klippenstein’s newsletter as well as other sources containing the Vance dossier. But unlike X, the company cited its policies against foreign meddling and the sharing of hacked materials as its rationale.
“Our policies do not allow content from hacked sources or content leaked as part of a foreign government operation to influence US elections,” the company said in a statement. “We will be blocking such materials from being shared on our apps under our Community Standards.”
For years, Musk and top Republicans torched Twitter’s leadership for its decision to temporarily block users from sharing a controversial New York Post article on Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign. The episode continues to spark outrage on the right, prompting numerous congressional hearings during which the company’s former leadership was grilled about the saga.
The veracity of the report, which centered on Biden’s purported laptop, has been heavily scrutinized. In 2022, The Washington Post verified the authenticity of thousands of emails purportedly taken from the laptop, but found that they made up a small fraction of the data the New York Post story was based on.
Just weeks before the 2020 election, the social network took the rare step of locking the New York Post’s account and barring users from posting links to the story over concerns it was based on hacked materials, amid concerns over a potential foreign hack-and-leak operation. Facebook, since renamed Meta, also temporarily limited the story’s circulation pending a fact-checking review but later lifted the restriction.
Twitter soon reversed its decision but continued to block users from sharing the report under a separate rule prohibiting users from publishing private user information — the same principle X is now citing to suspend Klippenstein. The story featured screenshots and documents containing people’s email addresses.
Twitter ultimately relented and allowed users to share the New York Post story ahead of the election, saying the personal information contained in the story had become readily available and public, and lifted a suspension against the New York Post’s account.
While Twitter pointed to its policies at the time, worries about a repeat of the Russian hack against Democratic officials during the 2016 campaign loomed over the ordeal.
But both companies later said the actions were a mistake, with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologizing for blocking the story and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying they were wrong to demote the article.
Conservatives criticized the companies for blocking the New York Post article while allowing some other publications to publish stories based on leaked or hacked materials or that include private information.
Musk himself has been a vocal critic of those moves, calling it “free speech suppression” and questioning whether those who suppressed the story should face jail time.
After acquiring the company in October 2022, Musk released internal company communications — dubbed the “Twitter Files” — to a Substack writer and announced in a series of threads that they would tell the tale of what “really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression.” The threads contained screenshots of messages by Twitter employees — including their email addresses — discussing various content moderation calls internally and externally. One exchange with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who was critical of Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden story, also contained his email address.
Given that history, Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, said the company’s decision to restrict the Vance dossier “looks like a hypocritical move.”
“X’s blocking of the Hunter Biden laptop story is a cause célèbre on the right and the go-to example for them of platform overreach. Here, the information is about not a relative of a political candidate, but a candidate themselves,” Douek said. “You would think that this is exactly what a ‘free speech platform’ would protect.”
Still, Douek said, X’s action appears to follow the spirit of its rules banning users from publishing or posting “other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission.”
Two physical addresses are listed in the vetting document, and both were already public: Vance’s Washington address is listed on a deed for the home, and the address for his property in Ohio appears in a listing for Kentucky’s legal bar. Vance separately owns a home in Alexandria, Va., but the address is not listed in the dossier. The vetting document also contains Vance’s partial Social Security number, with the last four digits obscured; it’s not clear whether that had previously been made public.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.
Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said that after taking a more aggressive posture toward content moderation in 2020, social media companies have largely taken a “U-turn” in 2024 — due in large part to the backlash over the Hunter Biden story.
Nonetheless, she said, “Twitter/X now seems to have decided to take that approach anyway as to this specific piece of content.”
Will Oremus and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
