Independent reporter
, formerly of The Intercept and now on Substack, has been permanently banned by Elon Musk’s X for publishing a post on Substack that linked to a dossier on Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance stolen from the Trump campaign in a hack.You can read that post and dossier on Ken’s substack. But you can’t find it on X, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, or even Google Drive.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, is preventing access to Ken’s post because their policies “do not allow content from hacked sources or content leaked as part of a foreign government operation to influence US elections.”
X , meanwhile, blocked the link and banned Ken’s account, which had more than 500,000 followers, because an address for Vance was not redacted in the initial post. Ken has since redacted that information, but the ban stands.
What does Ken think of all this? Well, he thinks it’s all political.
In this conversation, we dive deeper into that question and what it all says about the current state of the media system.
Ken Klippenstein on his ban from X, election interference, and freedom of the press