Yesterday I learned Ken Klippenstein posted a document on the web. On X, he posted a link to his commentary on his own website. That page also included a link to that document, a dossier on JD Vance. Not soon after, he was suspended from the service X for it. As of this morning, he remains suspended.
Will his account remain suspended? How would a person in that situation get an answer to that question?
We’re far enough along in the history of “social media” that we all known someone who has had an account suspended or banned from some service. Sometimes such an action was a fair decision, sometimes not.
Human society is made of conflicting people and conflicting laws. It may seem obvious to say “well you must follow the law” or “you have to follow the rules” but that is not really enough of an answer. Some laws and rights are in conflict. In fact, laws and rights are often in tension with each other. Journalism’s history is filled with examples like that. I’m a big fan of the movie The Post, which is about the story behind the story of the Washington Post’s decision to publish The Pentagon Papers. If you have 2 hours to spare and never thought about how journalists and publishers make decisions about documents that are in the public interest it’s a solid primer.
That case, in hindsight, is clearer than Klippenstein’s case, which has not entered any sort of court of law as of my writing. It may yet, but I won’t hold my breath for X, the name of what was Twitter after Elon Musk bought it, will make reasonable decisions about a journalistic free speech case.
I don’t want to get into specific details about the case but one thing that strikes me is that the link he made seems not to have been to “sensitive documents” as such, but to a web page which linked to the documents. The link is this string of characters: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-the-jd-vance-dossier
I read that link soon after learning about it. The link is words from Klippenstein, and a link to the actual document. He sets the context in a way I find convincing:
It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.”
I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.
I read some of the large PDF document at that link, on his own website, “kenklippenstein dot com.” It seems credible enough to me. It also doesn’t seem particularly sensitive. The rationale seems to be that because it contains personal addresses it triggers rules about “doxing” (revealing personal information) and thus must be banned. I’m not sure that makes sense. We expect candidates to the offices of President and Vice-President to be put under scrutiny. But reasonable people might disagree about whether that’s fair or not.
Earlier this year I talked about mistrust-based technology decisions. For me, the ban from X for this link is a fine reminder that the only website you can rely on is your own.
During an IndieWeb meetup Wednesday I talked about the ethos of using services like Instagram and regularly doing a calculation: “what are the restrictions and annoyances of using the service?” vs “what utility do I get from the service?” Depending on the result of that equation I can choose to stop using it or stick with it. This blog you’re reading was once powered by Blogger. At some point I made a different decision and left that service. I once regularly checked my MySpace page and it was a valuable place to keep in touch with friends and family and my interests. Now I don’t.
Given the flow of this post I find myself sneaking up on a decision to leave a service, but there’ll be no silo-quit punchline for me today. But I do want to report that as I sometimes do, I posted the link to Facebook, which I keep mostly for family and friend-reasons. My aunts and uncles are there. Family photos are there. And I have many Comic-Con friends there. I used it to coordinate tickets for the 2025 Comic-Con just this past weekend.
Anyway, I posted the link that got Klippenstein banned to Facebook because I found it an interesting commentary on the state of the media landscape. I didn’t view that link as particularly suspect. Once can read his commentary and not actually visit the link to the dossier itself. To me, it’s the dossier that is sensitive.
But the punchline is that a few hours after posting that link it was removed:
I’m not sure that was the right “decision” for Facebook to take. I’m not really sure it was wrong. But I do think that I like Klippenstein’s rationale for posting his commentary. And I am free to post my own comments on my own site without much fear of removal. I’m glad that I have stuck with having a website that I am in control of. I might not be newspaper in 1971 but in some sense I am a publisher. I am not a whistleblower like Ellsberg. I am not a journalist.
I am a person with my own website.
