Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign staff reportedly askedElon Musk to block links to the JD Vance dossier on the X platform before the action took place.
According to reports, members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff reached out to Elon Musk to request that links to a dossier on his running mate JD Vance be blocked on X, formerly Twitter. The request apparently came before X made the move to suspend Ken Klippenstein, the independent journalist, from the platform. Klippenstein had published a link to the dossier in his newsletter. The security account for the platform stated that their reason for the suspension was due to its “rules on posting unredacted private personal information.” Klippenstein had publicly queried why other press outlets hadn’t released the document after obtaining it. The Trump campaign claimed that it was leaked after an alleged hack by Iran.
Klippenstein would be reinstated quietly over the weekend just as the report from the New York Times broke. He wasn’t named in the article, but he would subsequently point out in posts on X, formerly Twitter, that Musk’s actions were contrary to his previous posturing as a “free speech absolutist” who had deemed actions by the platform in 2020 concerning the ban of stories about Hunter Biden and his laptop as “incredibly inappropriate” after acquiring the company in 2022. After backlash, former CEO Jack Dorsey changed the hacked materials policy to prevent the “straight blocking of URLs.”
The news comes as Musk has been more and more expressive in his support of the Republican presidential nominee, being described as “obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes of the election,” even appearing on stage with Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last week. He’s also expressed that fervor in a recent interview with former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson, where he stated that if Trump didn’t win in November he’d be “screwed.” It has not gone unnoticed by many on the X platform, who have noted how much pro-Trump propaganda has been allowed to be published there. Trump has recently said that he’d consider making Musk a part of his administration, remarking over the weekend at a campaign rally that he was looking to make him “Secretary of Cost-Cutting.”
