Twitter has suspended an account dedicated to covering the Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking trial, raising alarm bells among the platform’s critics. The popular account sported over half a million followers.
The ‘Maxwell Tracker Trial’ was the most popular account providing consistent coverage of the Maxwell trial. The account had over 525,000 followers on Wednesday when it was suspended.
Twitter claims the account was suspended for “platform manipulation and spam,” but it provided no specifics on its reasoning. Plenty of critics are crying foul and accusing the social media platform of trying to itself suppress information coming out of the Maxwell trial, which has seen muted coverage by corporate media.
Some critics also noted that another account, Nancy Pelosi Portfolio Tracker, was also suspended on Wednesday. That account was focused on House Speaker Pelosi’s personal investing. The suspensions come not long after Jack Dorsey announced he was stepping down as Twitter’s CEO, with Parag Agrawal taking the reins last week.
Maxwell is a former professional and personal partner to the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and she is currently facing charges of sex trafficking, with multiple women claiming Maxwell groomed them and helped Epstein sexually assault them. She has denied all wrongdoing in the case.
The Free Press Report, which runs the Twitter account, wrote in a Substack post on Wednesday that the Maxwell account had been suspended, along with all other accounts which had been created for that purpose. Twitter’s decision appeared to cause more confusion than anything else.
“According to Twitter’s rules, apparently the account was ‘artificially’ amplifying information. I am not sure what I was ‘amplifying’ and how I was doing that,” the account holder wrote, noting the account had been used primarily to simply convey facts from the ongoing trial and the engagement it received was “all organic” and not artificially amplified.
An appeal will be filed to Twitter, but “it is likely we will never hear from them,” the post added.
A new, separate account following Maxwell’s trial has already been created and garnered thousands of followers.