This week, The Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh was hacked, giving a hacker named Doomed unfettered access to his Twitter, Google and Microsoft accounts. A journalist named Dell Cameron then tweeted encouraging the hacker to contact him and then published an interview with Doomed for Wired. Tweeting that story – Cameron confirmed on Mastodon – eventually got the tech policy reporter permanently suspended from Twitter for violating the social platform’s rules. policy about distributing hacked material.
Now Walsh is threatening to sue “members of the media who have openly requested stolen information” from his phone. tweeted. Announcing that The Daily Wire’s team was assisting him with legal advice, he warned journalists like Cameron that he could afford to hire “very good lawyers”.
Walsh was not immediately available for comment. Cameron declined to comment. Yesterday, Tweeted by phone a statement from the editor-in-chief, Hemal Jhaveri.
“WIRED learned Wednesday afternoon that senior reporter Dell Cameron’s Twitter account was permanently suspended after he reported that Matt Walsh’s Twitter account had been hacked,” Jhaveri’s statement read. “Neither Dell’s story nor his Twitter feed contained hacked material. We don’t believe his account violated Twitter policies. We received no further explanation from Twitter, and our attempts to reach Twitter’s press office were met with the usual poop emoji. We ask that the account be reinstated and that Twitter provide an explanation.”
Since Cameron’s suspension, there has been debate over whether the journalist’s report violated Twitter’s policies and whether Walsh has legal authority to sue a journalist like Cameron for reporting on the hack.
Twitter sometimes deviates from “editorial review”
Twitter’s Hacked Materials Policy was last updated in October 2020, following the scandal in which the platform blocked a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s hacked laptop.
Current policies target hackers who illegally obtain private information, as well as groups “associated with a hack”. It defines hacked material as “information obtained through a hack” that “does not have to be personally identifiable private information to qualify as hacked material under this policy.”
According to the policy, it is against the rules to “share private information without permission, regardless of how the private information was obtained.” It’s also against the rules to post tweets that link to “hacked content hosted on other websites,” which Twitter may consider Wired’s report on the hack. Thursday afternoon editor-in-chief of Wired Gideon Lichfield tweeted that Twitter told Cameron he had “broken its rules by ‘distributing directly'[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may physically harm or endanger people, or contain trade secrets.”
In Wired’s report, Cameron interviews the hacker, who goes by the alias Doomed, and reveals that Doomed’s motivation was to “stir up controversy and create chaos on Twitter” by posting absurd tweets using Walsh’s handle. Some of these tweets threw “jabs” at some of Walsh’s conservative colleagues, including podcaster Joe Rogan and Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro.
To verify that the hacker was the same person who purportedly accessed Walsh’s accounts, Cameron viewed “several screenshots” of hacked material and described some of those screenshots in the report. He also quoted from some of the hacked emails, which could be considered hosting “hacked content” under Twitter’s policy. Lichfield competed in one tweet that the email quotes were “benign” and did not “publish hacked material”.
However, Twitter’s policy also includes an exception for when hacked material is used as source material that “may serve as the basis for important news agency coverage designed to hold our institutions and leaders accountable.” In that section, Twitter says it will “defer” to the “editorial judgment” of media outlets publishing hacked material, which Twitter deems “indirect distribution.”
Because Walsh is a public figure, but not an “institution” or “leader,” the exception for newsworthy hacking coverage may not apply to the Wired story. But the policy also notes that the exception is only for when media outlets are sharing the actual hacked material, not when media outlets are simply “discussing hacked material.” The logic is a bit round. Twitter says reports of hacked material “will not be considered a violation of this policy unless material related to the hack is disseminated directly in the text of a Tweet, in an image shared on Twitter, or in links to hacked content hosted on other websites.”
Wired has asked Twitter to reinstate Cameron’s account, but for now it remains permanently suspended, a fate normally reserved for “accounts engaged in the direct distribution of hacked material found to be directly controlled by hackers, hacking groups or people. acting for or on behalf of such hackers.”
