The journalist here is not being entirely truthful. While much of the information that the campaign used to vet JD Vance was public, not all of it was, and the internal comments are definitely not public information.
It's a bit like saying hacked internal emails are public if they are discussing public topics.
The reason the media generally doesn't publish hacked documents is so they don't create an incentive for people to hack documents. It's the same reason why many media companies won't publish pictures and sometimes names of mass shooters and child suicides.
You're free to do it. But many media companies don't do it for legitimate practical, ethical, and moral reasons.
> You're free to do it. But many media companies don't do it for legitimate practical, ethical, and moral reasons.
But Twitter’s current owner has explicitly attacked the media for exactly this reason, and has claimed repeatedly and self-aggrandizingly to value free speech above such concerns.
All he had to do was redact things like his home address, phone number and social security number. Doing so wouldn't have affected any of the other content and also wouldn't have run afoul of Twitters policies.
Talk about grandstanding over nothing. Then again being an ass gets you more attention so mission accomplished!
He attacked them for censoring opposing viewpoints for political and ideological reasons. That's a far cry from hacked personal information. I admit, it is a bit of a grey line, but neither of these cases are particularly close to the line.
He attacked Twitter in the past for banning someone for the exact same reason.
Musk was one of the people who was unhappy with the decision to ban links to the Post’s story. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk wrote of the decision on the story in April 2022. He even invited former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi to examine internal documents showing how Twitter handled the decision. (In the course of tweeting his conclusions, Taibbi exposed the email addresses of Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna.)
Yes. WaPo didn’t post the contents of the laptop. They reported on the fbi report that hunters laptop was turned in with incriminating information.
It’s the difference between reporting on a hack (though Hunters laptop wasn’t hacked) and releasing the hack.
Info from Hunter Biden’s laptop was a focus of the “Twitter Files” and explicitly involved information being taken unethically and possibly illegally from a laptop at a repair shop.
Silly me. I thought the reason why the media did not publish hacked documents it's because it is difficult to verify their provenance.
It's political, which means even if it's unethical, and maybe even illegal, some people will feel it's deserved and support it.
> 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.
Be aware that it fits an ongoing to campaign to limit free speech, especially in regard to goverment officials and public figures. They want to make it illegal or impossible to criticize government or powerful people, both of which are the foundations of free speech - those are the most important forms of speech.
They approach it in multiple ways that I'm aware of:
* They want the Supreme Court to change their precedent - as the current court has done many times for other areas of law - in the 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case, which established that public officials only have a claim if they prove the critical speech was false and also was published with "actual malice"; that is "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." At least one of the conservative justices, I forget which one, has encouraged people to bring such a case to the Supreme Court so the justice could rule on it.
* They use or legally harass people into ceasing publication, including by having the state attack them. Examples include the lawsuit against Media Matters. Even if the defendants win, the financial impact can be enormous. Many can't afford to publish criticism.
In the end, everything comes down to politics. Politics makes the law, so it overcomes rule of law. If you don't get involved and make these things change - like our predecessors did to build the freedom the US already enjoys - freedom, including free speech will diminish.
It had his home address, phone numbers and social security numbers. A reasonable person would just redact those before publishing and then it wouldn't have been an issue.
There could be a bit of validity to the complaint, but don't imagine for a moment that it's not being used to pursue the larger issue.
Do you have evidence of this? Because otherwise it seems pretty reasonable to ban someone for posting that kind of information. If someone posted the same data on Kamala or Tim I’d expect to see them banned.
Do I have evidence of Elon Musk's private thoughts? Let me look ...
> it seems pretty reasonable
It seems like overkill to me. Harris's and Wallz's residences are well known.
Sophisticated public manipulators - and I think we can call Musk one of those - of course don't openly discuss it. One way to analyze the action is to look at the outcome: Musk is certainly sophisticated enough to anticipate the outcome and that would factor into his choice. Cui bono?
These are all redacted in the current version, including his real estate records.
Their rules are fairly clear about hack-and-leak content. A lot of other social media platforms don't allow it either.
As far as I know Twitter is still HQ in California and the current laws is:
The legal definition of posting harmful information on the internet under California Penal Code 653.2 is as follows:
You used an electronic communication device to distribute electronically, publish, email, hyperlink or make available for downloading personal identifying information or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person;
You did so without that person’s consent;
You did so with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his/her safety or the safety of his/her immediate family;
You did so for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury or harassment; andThe personal identifying information or message you shared would be likely to incite or produce that unwanted physical contact, injury or harassment.
That must apply to private people. Obviously you can post leaks about public figures, without their consent, with the intent they be harassed.
That is the most important form of free speech - criticising political candidates.
Free speech on privately owned platforms will always be an illusion at best.
TFA didn't mention what private information was contained in the dossier. Is it his street address? SSN?
Yes, his current home address is listed on one of the first pages.
It's also listed on dozens of election websites as part of his FEC filings, and is in no way private.
Can you provide a link? I just looked at a few FEC filings for Vance and they list a PO Box or an office in Ohio, not his home address.
Did it feel like free speech when you got banned?
x is a private company and it can do what it wants
It's not that the banning itself is wrong. It highlights the hypocrisy of Musk's claims about free speech.
Publishing someone's social security number is "free speech"?
When everything is supposed to be "free speech", then yes. That's exactly why total free speech is a red herring.
he can be as hypocritical as he wants; it's his platform
When someone is hypocritical, I'm inclined to question their motivations and lower my trust in anything they say on that topic.
Musk claims he bought Twitter to champion free speech. This is undermined by the fact that the site selectively censors posts or accounts for e.g. criticising Israeli policy or publishing publicly available flight data.
Which is your right to lower your trust! Just don't expect him or X to give you a platform to air said grievances. You don't have a right to speak truth to power on that power's platform or for anyone to care. I've been told ad nauseam that the first amendment only applies to government.
I feel like you keep missing the point. Which is: this undermines Elon Musk's claim to free speech advocacy.
I've never liked Twitter and have never used it. Doesn't mean I can't criticise it!
And we can say what we want about that.
Few dispute that, though it's fair to point out the hypocrisy of its owner who loudly champions free speech on social media platforms when it suits him to do so.
Free speech for his (Elon: Right Wing) ideology, not for everyone.
It's the Big Lie time and time again: cry wolf about your opponents doing something you want to do in the near future. Keep talking about it, and get louder when you start doing it yourself, and your loyalists will keep looking the other way.
Of course you write this post to have the discourse - but it is Elon's website and he can do what he wants with it I suppose. I don't think any era of Twitter has had very consistent moderation decisions and I don't think it matters much in any era - either now or when conservatives were making hay about it around covid. It seems clear that the prevailing political views of the owner are influential, but not dictatorial, and that's about as good as it gets in our world.
That said I am all for yelling at elon to try to get him to change the policies, which works a lot of the time, and seems like a pretty reasonable way to manage the margins of these things.
Now do it for the other VP candidate let's see what happens. If your theory is right he should not ban it right?
only one of the vp candidates has a dossier like this
Are you saying Harris's team didn't vet Walz, or that the Iranians didn't acquire and distribute the findings?
Iirc the Iranians attempted to, but were unsuccessful. I have no doubt that the Harris campaign wrote up documents about each of their potential VPs.