Donald Trump’s presidential campaign worked with X to prevent information about his running mate JD Vance from being posted on the social media platform, a move that resulted in the journalist who revealed the information being kicked off the site, according to reports.
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 Vance that was linked to by Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist, the New York Times has reported.
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 were hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence before she ultimately lost that election to Trump. At one point Trump also said he hoped Russia would be “able to find” some of Clinton’s files.
Related: The leaked dossier on JD Vance is revealing in all the things it doesn’t say | Moira Donegan
The removal of the material from X has highlighted the increasingly strident support of Musk, the world’s richest person, for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk said that he was an advocate of free speech and the open sharing of information, even if it offended either political party.
Last week, Musk appeared at a Pennsylvania rally alongside the former president, performing an awkward jump on stage before declaring that “I’m not just Maga – I’m dark Maga” while invoking the Republican nominee’s Make America Great Again slogan.
Musk added that “this will be the last election” if Trump doesn’t win in November against Kamala Harris, complaining that she and her fellow Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively”.
Klippenstein, whose X account has been restored following the New York Times reporting, said in a Substack post on Friday that Musk had purchased political influence and “is wielding that influence in increasingly brazen ways”.
“The real election interference here is that a social media corporation can decree certain information unfit for the American electorate,” he wrote.
“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.”
Musk is set to appear at further Trump rallies – and he may even knock on voters’ doors for the campaign in Pennsylvania in the coming week. He has funded a political action entity called America Pac that has spent around $80m to help Trump reach voters in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania.
