My Twitter Ban Is Political

I redacted the JD Vance Dossier. Surprise: I’m still banned

It’s been widely reported that my suspension from X (Twitter) is only temporary. Those reports are false. My ban from X, the company says, is permanent. 

The confusion arises from the media’s reliance on a rare statement issued yesterday by X announcing my “temporary suspension” — remarks X’s spokesperson has reiterated in discussion with the media. 

X’s wordplay has insulated the company from backlash, so it’s not hard to imagine why they’re doing it. But X informed me privately that I was permanently banned from the platform, as you can see below. (This has not been reported anywhere.)

Screenshot of my X account

The two-step dance X is doing here — avoiding further backlash by pretending like my suspension is just a temporary thing, no big deal, while privately suspending me permanently — only makes sense when you consider the political dimensions.

Elon Musk is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s political campaign. The Wall Street Journal reported that he promised $45 million a month for a pro-Trump Super PAC (Musk subsequently disputed this). So X clearly doesn’t want to give the appearance that my ban was politically motivated. But a careful look at the pretext X cites for my suspension makes it obvious that this is  political.

X’s policies state that “you cannot share” private information including “home addresses” — the reason cited for my suspension. But I didn’t post any home addresses to X. I posted an article that contained a link to a 272-page PDF that itself included several such addresses. That does not violate X’s policies. And even if it did, other X users post links to home addresses all the time without being suspended, as many X users have pointed out. Per independent journalist

Lee Fang

, X applies one standard for Vance and another for Biden. He writes:

The Hunter Biden laptop case is a particularly damning example. Musk was so incensed by Twitter’s previous owners’ decision to block the story on its platform that he took the extraordinary step of releasing Twitter’s internal correspondence to independent journalist

Matt Taibbi

so he could report on how the decision came about. (I support his transparency, by the way.) 

Yet in the case of a link to my news article, which by any definition involves much less “private” information than the salacious contents of the Hunter Biden laptop, I receive a permanent ban. By the way, Musk himself is on record saying “it’s not really doxxing if you just googled it,” as independent journalist

Jack Poulson

pointed out. 

Vance’s home address and contacts are readily available online, even on government sites, both as part of his Bar Association certification and on state election material available to the public. Still, the frenzy claiming I’d “doxxed” Vance gave Musk his pretext to ban any links to the dossier; the decision was purely political, tantamount to saying that no one should read the document.

Now, anyone posting a link to my article finds their account locked, which is exactly how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post.

Here’s the biggest tell that this is political. X typically provides users who post something in violation of its policies the opportunity to remove the offending posts in order to have their accounts reinstated. I have received no such offer. As an experiment, last night my editor and I decided to redact all “private” information from the Vance Dossier in my story here at Substack. Despite filing an appeal in which I mention this, I remain banned. So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies. What else would you call this but politically motivated?

Boo hoo, poor me, I lost my account. That’s not the point here. If you were frustrated with the media’s refusal to publish the Vance dossier, prepare for a future that’s worse. The media is going to see the case of the Vance dossier and conclude that reporting on similar documents isn’t worth losing their social media accounts over. Why take the risk when you can just blather on about the horse race? As always, it’s the public that loses out the most.

— Edited by William M. Arkin