Twitter’s banning of Ken Klippenstein and suppression of his journalism should be a wake-up call that tech censorship is a threat to press freedom across the political spectrum.
Elon Musk’s Twitter/X has banned reporter Ken Klippenstein for publishing newsworthy documents about vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance. (Chesnot / Getty Images)
It has been hard in recent years to get anyone remotely left of center to care about the threat of tech censorship. The matter has either become such a right-wing obsession or been taken up by various figures who have fallen afoul of liberal opinion that it’s become a virtual point of faith for many that it’s all a bunch of Donald Trump supporters complaining that they’ve lost the ability to spam misinformation online — despite copious evidence to the contrary.
But that could, and certainly should, change now, after Twitter — now known as X — suspended former Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein’s account over a story he had published that was potentially damaging to the Trump campaign, even going so far as to prevent the link to the piece from being shared on the website. In fact, Klippenstein was “permanently suspended,” meaning he has been banned forever, barred from even making a new account. As of the time of writing, you still can’t share his story, with Twitter informing you that the link “has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful” if you try to post it.
Officially, the reason Twitter/X has suspended Klippenstein is because the story he published — internal opposition research on Trump’s running mate J. D. Vance, which was allegedly hacked from the Trump campaign by the Iranian government — contained “unredacted private personal information.” Specifically, the document as published contained Vance’s address and part of his Social Security number (both have been redacted now).
This is similar to what happened four years ago, when the New York Post published its own “October surprise,” using material from Hunter Biden’s laptop while his father was trying to win the presidential election against Trump. On the basis that the laptop’s contents held intimate personal information — which, to be fair, they did, because pictures of the younger Biden’s penis were all over them, as were bank records, his Social Security card, and much more — Twitter not only took the extreme step of locking the Post out of its own account but likewise prevented people from posting links to the Post’s stories. The measure was further buttressed by the intervention of the country’s former spy chiefs, dozens of whom claimed in a public letter that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” — a claim that, it soon turned out, was completely false and had been coordinated with the Biden campaign.
Back then, many left-of-center commentators ignored the scandal or even justified Twitter’s actions — after all, the story was seen as an eleventh-hour election boost to Trump. Not so now, when even the most hard-line Democratic partisans are outraged about Twitter’s censorship, since the shoe is on the other foot. (Amusingly, as part of this mindless partisan do-si-do that’s core to US political discourse, the same Right that complained about the Post being censored has now taken up its opponents’ rhetoric in support of censorship here, almost verbatim).
The Media Lessons of 2016
To understand why Twitter’s attempts to throttle Klippenstein’s story here are such a big deal, and why they’re so dystopian, you have to understand the course of events that led him to publish the Vance dossier in the first place. In reality, this and other material has been floating around for months, and was first shopped by the presumed hacker to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico, who proclaimed their refusal to publish it, pointing to its lack of newsworthiness. Several Democratic-friendly journalists were also handed the material and likewise announced they would not report on it.
And to understand the head-scratching sight of reporters and news organizations uniformly refusing to publish the leaked internal documents of a presidential campaign they’ve been highly critical of, you have to understand what the 2016 election did to the brains of the nation’s heavily Democratic-voting journalists.
After Trump won in 2016 — a year when suspected Russian government hackers handed highly embarrassing internal Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails to WikiLeaks, which posted them publicly — the American press blamed itself. Rather than Clinton’s hapless and incompetent campaign, or the DNC’s decision to put its thumb on the scales for her in the primary, journalists and newsrooms convinced themselves that they were to blame for Trump’s victory, specifically by doing their jobs and reporting on newsworthy material that was damaging to his rival and therefore playing a role in achieving the preferred outcome of the adversarial state allegedly responsible for the hack.
“Every major publication” that covered the leaks in 2016 ended up “becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence,” Times reporters astonishingly charged that year. A prominent lawyer urged journalists to “voluntarily adopt a professional norm against publishing the contents of a hack.” A separate Times columnist praised the French press for refusing to write about material hacked from their president’s campaign.
This is very much the same reasoning that’s been used to justify newsrooms sitting on a mountain of Trump campaign material this year. As Tara Palmeri put it, “I think we all learned a few things from 2016.” For Judd Legum, it was the fact that “the materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.” (Legum also made clear that part of his motivation was that, as a former longtime Clintonworld operative, his emails to John Podesta were some of those that were published in 2016.)
In Defense of Journalism
To be clear, this is all absurd. Was this material hacked by Iran, which has its own specific reasons for wanting to damage Trump and let his opponent win? Very possibly — it’s certainly what’s been alleged in a recent grand jury indictment. And is it the case that this material has, technically, been stolen or at least improperly accessed before it made it into the hands of reporters? Undoubtedly.
But, and here is the crucial part, none of this matters to the act of reporting. There’s a term for what reporters do when they publish improperly obtained material from a source with their own distinct motivations: journalism. If the standard being applied here by the US press was applied more broadly, a host of important recent and historic scoops would never have been published: the Panama and Pandora Papers (which had all the hallmarks of being a Western hack and dump operation), Trump’s tax returns (which someone was put in prison for leaking), the NSA mass surveillance documents, as well as the Pentagon Papers, the most famous and celebrated leak in US history — to name just a few.
Publishing the Vance dossier and other Trump campaign material is, in other words, entirely consistent with past practice of the US media and basic journalistic values. The reason they’ve sat on it isn’t that it’s not newsworthy — it’s that liberals and members of the US press made a host of overwrought arguments against publishing hacked material for partisan reasons after 2016 and now don’t want to look like hypocrites.
How can the material not be newsworthy when plenty in the dossier has been already dug up and published as news? And plenty hasn’t, like Vance’s comments to CNN in 2017 that Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare — which is still the Trump campaign’s health care “plan” today with Vance on the ticket — was “the thing that may be most politically damaging” to him and what “folks back home” were “most worried about.” As a whole, the material suggests that the Trump campaign, which postures as pro-worker and economically populist, views Vance’s opposition to Trump’s plutocratic tax cuts and support for things like raising the capital gains tax as political liabilities — a rare insight into the thinking of Trump’s team.
But there’s one last, bigger point to make here, which is that the Klippenstein suspension is a good preview of a future few of us want to live in, but that we are steadily headed towards. If the censorship enthusiasts had their way, not just Twitter and other social media platforms but even YouTube and Substack — the platform Klippenstein published the dossier on — would be clamped down on in the fight against “misinformation.” We would be in a world where the respectable, establishment press refuses to publish a major story due to decorum and their own intellectual snookering of themselves, but the independent press that tries to report on it is throttled.
Beyond that, we need to start asking ourselves, if Twitter and other social media platforms are going to be a permanent part of our world, is this the best way for them to be organized and run? As Klippenstein has written since, his ban is driven by politics, at the hands of a thin-skinned billionaire tyrant who has publicly and explicitly pledged his support for the campaign that is affected by this leak. The current options are to either stay on a Twitter/X that is run by an unaccountable right-wing oligarch its users have no democratic ability to influence or leave it and join another platform, which, like Twitter, could one day also change hands and be run by an unaccountable right-wing oligarch. There has to be a better way.
As we explore potential options for doing so, the big question is whether the current liberal outrage over tech censorship will actually stick; or, once there’s a different target and it’s being carried out by someone who is at least not loathed by them, will they go back to ignoring and even cheering it. The liberal-left has been shown firsthand that tech censorship isn’t simply a right-wing issue but heavily affects them, too. Let’s hope something comes of it.