Twitter has permanently banned the account of Dell Cameron, a leftist reporter for tech outlet Wired, after he broke the platform’s rules on soliciting hacked material after he requested (and obtained) hacked materials from the accounts of conservative commentator Matt Walsh.
Wired denied that Cameron violated any of the Twitter rules, even though one of his tweets prior to the ban was a request for the hackers to email him Walsh’s hacked DMs. In a statement, the leftist tech mag said that Cameron did not post any hacked materials, although one of his tweets prior to the ban was a redacted picture of Walsh’s email inbox.
Dell Cameron, a leftist senior reporter for WIRED, used Twitter to solicit stolen information belonging to @MattWalshBlog, who was hacked last night. pic.twitter.com/wsaOWRmPnc
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) April 19, 2023
“Neither Dell’s story nor his Twitter feed contained hacked materials. We do not believe his account violated Twitter’s policy,” said Wired managing editor Hemal Jhaveri in a statement.
“We have not received any further explanation from Twitter and our attempts to reach Twitter’s press office were met with the customary poop emoji. We ask that the account be reinstated, and that Twitter provide an explanation.”
The “customary poop emoji” is the automated response that journalists now receive if they send an email to Twitter’s press department, which was recently dissolved by Elon Musk.
Twitter’s hacked materials policy was infamously and tenuously applied by Twitter to the New York Post in 2020 as an excuse to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, even though the material belonging to Biden was not hacked, but voluntarily abandoned by the President’s son at a computer repair store, and concerned public-interest matters relating to the highest levels of government.
In Cameron’s case, Wired will likely point to the part of the Twitter rules that acknowledges hacked materials as sometimes being “the basis for important reporting by news agencies meant to hold our institutions and leaders to account.”
However, Twitter also states that in “most cases, discussions of or reporting about hacking or hacked materials constitutes indirect distribution,” which is punishable by warning labels.
By posting a screenshot of Walsh’s inbox, Cameron may have violated Twitter’s policy on the direct distribution of hacked materials, which is subject to harsher penalties.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
