Months ago, Iranian hackers — part of a larger operation detailed in a recently unsealed indictment — offered media organizations the Trump campaign’s vice presidential vetting file on Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio. All turned it down. Eventually, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published it on his Substack account.
I’m not linking, because I think this is a national security issue, and we should disincentivize foreign interference by denying rewards as much as possible (if you absolutely must see it, Google Klippenstein). But what’s even more instructive than the dossier itself is how the media and Elon Musk reacted to it. It both shows how much the media has evolved for the better since it abetted Russian interference in the 2016 election and provides yet more evidence that Musk is a partisan activist, not an advocate of free speech.
Now that the Vance dossier is public, widespread rejection followed by publication on one person’s Substack account sends the message that the origins are questionable.
The news media rejected the Vance dossier as stolen material and foreign interference, which drew comparisons to 2016’s Russia-hacked Hillary Clinton campaign emails. Some media leaders said nothing in the Vance dossier was “newsworthy.” But by those standards, Clinton campaign emails weren’t, either.
Media organizations won’t say they’ve been more cautious with the Vance dossier as a corrective to their mistakes in 2016, when they let foreign hackers set their agenda. But it’s still good that they’re resisting. Even now that the Vance dossier is public, widespread rejection followed by publication on one person’s Substack account sends the message that the origins are questionable.
But this isn’t the first time the media showed a more cautious approach than it did in 2016. The Hunter Biden laptop story got similar treatment.
In 2020, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani shopped around a story that Joe Biden’s son Hunter allegedly left a computer at a New Jersey repair shop in a drugged-out haze. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others turned it down. Rudy’s story had holes, they couldn’t independently verify it, and there was reasonable suspicion of foreign hacking.
Giuliani spent months in Ukraine trying to drum up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in the scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. Russian intelligence had reportedly hacked Burisma, a Ukrainian company for which Hunter had worked. And U.S. counterintelligence had warned the White House that Russia had targeted Giuliani, trying to use him, with or without his knowledge, as a conduit for misinformation.
But Rudy kept offering, and eventually someone published it. The New York Post ran the story, but no regular reporters would put their names on it, so it put it out under that of one who didn’t know she’d be in the byline and of a deputy editor who hadn’t written a story before and later left for Breitbart.
We still don’t know whether the “laptop” files were (1) real but stolen and released through a cut-out, like hacked Hillary emails; (2) a mix of real and fake, like the discredited Steele Dossier, in which the true aspects make the fake parts more credible; or (3) did not have any foreign involvement or hacked materials. Given the suspicious source, content — salacious but not especially newsworthy — and origins, turning down the story made sense.
The same logic applies to the Vance Dossier, except that it’s moved beyond suspicion of foreign interference, with charges filed in court.
Musk was so incensed about supposedly biased content moderation at Twitter that he bought the website.
Turning down this suspicious material arguably helps Trump by keeping negative info about his VP nominee from the public. Turning down suspicious material in 2020 arguably helped Biden by keeping negative info about his son from the public. But whatever the electoral effect, it’s an ethic applied whenever suspicious material arises, not a partisan exercise.
Which brings us to Musk. In 2020, tech companies reacted similarly to the New York Post laptop story. Facebook slowed the spread, and Twitter (under old management) blocked the URL, preventing users from sharing the article for a few days, then allowing it but adding a warning label.
I thought Twitter’s URL block was an unnecessary overstep, but the label was reasonable. You might draw the line differently. A lot of content moderation is based on judgment calls.
But the right flipped out. Congressional Republicans held hearings, with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas absurdly denouncing Twitter’s actions as “election interference.” Musk complained, without evidence, that it had a “material impact on the election.” A lot of this was frustration that a long-gestating political attack didn’t land, but they treated it as a grand injustice. Musk was so incensed about supposedly biased content moderation at Twitter that he bought the website, promising to expose the theorized censorship conspiracy. The result was the “Twitter Files,” a pathetic flop that, if anything, demonstrated the opposite. Musk claimed serious violations of the First Amendment, then showed people who aren’t in government reporting unauthorized naked photos of Hunter Biden as terms of service violations. (In case you didn’t know, declining to disseminate nude photos, hacked or otherwise, is a choice the First Amendment protects.) After a few years of bloviating that his Hunter Biden laptop stance was about free speech, Musk had Twitter (now called X) censor the Vance Dossier, permanently banning Klippenstein and blocking the URL so no one could post the link. As of this writing, it’s still blocked, making the ban longer and more comprehensive than the one for the New York Post laptop story. Meta and Google have partially suppressed the Vance Dossier, as well. It’s an articulation of what Musk means by ‘free speech’: promote causes he likes, suppress causes he doesn’t. Musk tried claiming the dossier was “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen” because it included private addresses. But the Hunter Biden laptop files he publicized had private addresses and other personal information, including nude photos. This is more than just hypocrisy. It’s an articulation of what Musk means by “free speech”: promote causes he likes, suppress causes he doesn’t. It’s apparent in the larger context, which includes Musk’s censoring political opposition in Turkey and India at their governments’ request but fighting Brazil over requests to shut down misinformation that fueled Brazil’s pro-Bolsonaro Jan. 8 riots. Now he has endorsed and promotes Donald Trump and, just this week, Musk said that unless Trump wins this will be the last U.S. election, trying to invert concerns about Trump’s threat to constitutional democracy. The media handled the Vance Dossier pretty well. The mistake most of it made, and too many in it are still making, is going along with Musk’s self-description as a champion of free speech, when his actions repeatedly show the opposite.
Nicholas Grossman
Nicholas Grossman is a political science professor at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital and the author of "Drones and Terrorism." 
