The New York Times reports that Twitter co-ordinated with the Trump Campaign to ensure that damaging information about GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was kept off the platform. It disclosed this fact somewhere within a floaty piece about Elon Musk's massive financial donations to Trump's campaign, and so we go instead to The Guardian for context:
The former president's team contacted X, owned by the billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk, about a 271-page document compiled by his campaign to vet his running mate … X responded by blocking links to the material, claiming that it contained sensitive personal information such as the Ohio US senator's social security number, and banned Klippenstein from the platform. The materials published by Klippenstein on his Substack in September appear to be related to a hack of the Trump campaign earlier this year, which the FBI has linked to Iran. Documents from the hack have been shared with several media outlets, which have chosen to not publish them.
Media outlets did not reach the same decision when they gave significant attention to files from Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign that had been hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence before she ultimately lost that election to Trump. At one point, Trump had said he hoped Russia would be "able to find" some of Clinton's files.
Klippenstein: "The real election interference here is that a social media corporation can decree certain information unfit for the American electorate. Two of our most sacred rights as Americans are the freedoms of speech and assembly, online or otherwise. It is a national humiliation that these rights can be curtailed by anyone with enough digits in their bank account."
Here's a bet I feel confident in winning: both The New York Times and The Guardian will continue to publish reportage that, without qualification, describes Musk and Twitter as "free speech absolutism" or in similar terms.
That mainstream journalists are still on Twitter— addicted, obligated, cynical, take your pick—is not a joke. They are not immune to how it shapes their media environment and their understanding of the world. I'd say to pour one out for all the journos languishing in Elon's seraglio, waiting to be strangled by the eunuchs, but unless the bottle was stolen from the Things I Won't Work With chemistry blog you're wasting it.
