Trump Campaign and Elon Musk’s X Worked Together to Suppress Reporting on Hacked Info: NYT
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The Trump campaign “connected” with social media platform X, owned by billionaire MAGA supporter Elon Musk, to suppress links to a journalist’s newsletter that contained a leaked dossier allegedly stolen from the campaign when Iran reportedly hacked it.
The September newsletter, published by journalist Ken Klippenstein, included a dossier on former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), which Klippenstein was sent by an unknown source who claimed it had been acquired in a hack of the Trump campaign. Other news outlets said they’d also obtained some hacked information but chose not to publish it.
In response, X blocked users from posting links to Klippenstein’s newsletter and suspended the journalist from the platform. At the time, X stated that Klippenstein’s suspension was due to the release of “unredacted private personal information” but did not clarify why the links to his newsletter were blocked.
On Friday, in a lengthy article on how Musk is “going all in” for Trump and wielding his influence to drum up support for the Republican nominee, The New York Times cited two sources who claim “the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform.”
The passing note sheds new light on the incident and suggests that Musk’s platform moved to block the links after the Trump campaign reached out. The paragraph, buried in the middle of the article, reads:
After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
Before Musk’s 2022 purchase of X, then Twitter, the organization had a policy banning sharing hacked materials. In October 2020, however, Twitter came under heavy fire from critics like Musk after it banned links to a New York Post article claiming to have obtained emails and video from a laptop allegedly owned by President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
After the backlash the hacked materials policy was changed by then-CEO Jack Dorsey to stop the “straight blocking of URLs.”
After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk invited journalist Matt Taibbi to examine internal communications to further investigate the company’s handling of the Post controversy. The investigation became known as The Twitter Files. At the time, Musk, who touts himself as a free speech advocate and anti-censorship advocate, slammed the decision to ban links to the Hunter Biden laptop story over hacked material as “incredibly inappropriate.”
