Twitter Banned Me

I was banned after publishing the JD Vance Dossier

Self-styled free speech warrior Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) banned me after I published a copy of the Donald Trump campaign’s JD Vance research dossier. X says that I’ve been suspended for “violating our rules against posting private information,” citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier. First, I never published any private information on X. I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.

Email I received from X explaining my suspension.

The principle involved here is complex. I do not believe it is the job of the news media to alter documents, as if it’s a defacto government deciding what the public should and shouldn't know. Yes, I know that it is general practice to delete “private” information from leaks and classified documents, but in this case, not only is Vance an elected official and Vice Presidential candidate, but the information is readily available for anyone to buy.

The document itself describes its method of acquiring the so-called “private” information about Vance: "We undertook an examination of all readily available and relevant electronic and online records, several hundred Nexis and news articles, dozens of active and archived web pages, and several dozen public records from Nexis and the resources of various federal, state, and municipal government offices." In other words, everything was out there, either readily or for purchase.

We should be honest about so-called private information contained in the dossier and "private" information in general. It is readily available to anyone who can buy it. The campaign purchased this information from commercial information brokers. Those dealers make huge profits from selling this data. And the media knows it, because they buy the data for reporting purposes, just like the campaign. They don’t like to mention that though.

On the one hand, this is a very funny end to my Twitter journey. On the other hand, I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public. This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety. Not a single media organization was willing to publish a document that would have been a no-brainer during or prior to the heyday of Edward Snowden’s disclosures. That illustrates the dramatic shift in attitudes about what the news media thinks the public should know, and the role the mainstream plays in steadily ceding that territory to the national security threat machine. Media’s job, I believe, is to push back against these various forms of censorship. I’ll keep doing that here on this newsletter, where you can find me going forward. If you agree with what I laid out, I hope you’ll subscribe.

Did I make a mistake in not redacting the “private” information on J.D. Vance? If I wanted a Twitter account, apparently so. But on principle? I stand by it absolutely.