Twitter bans popular accounts that tracked Ghislaine Maxwell trial and Nancy Pelosi's stock trades

Twitter has suspended @NancytTracker, a popular account that tracked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's stock trades and reported on the wealth Pelosi and her husband have accrued through trading. The social media platform also suspended @TrackerTrial, an account that posted updates on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and was, according to the account's owner, the largest account on Twitter that specifically tracked the trial at the time.

Both accounts were operated by the Free Press Report, a newsletter on Substack. In a post Wednesday, the Free Press Report said that Twitter suspended the @TrackerTrial account and "all the other accounts that I have made in the past" as well. A screenshot of an email the Free Press Report received from Twitter indicates the accounts were banned for allegedly violating the platform's rules against platform manipulation and spam.

"You may not use Twitter's services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people's experience on Twitter," the company told the Free Press Report.

The account operator denied that the @TrackerTrial account had violated Twitter's rules by artificially inflating its followers or engagement.

"The account got insane engagement, which by the way, was all organic. There was not outside amplification. The people wanted to hear the truth about the Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein trial and the engagement numbers showed that," the Free Press Report wrote. "There were hundreds of millions in impressions and an account that went from zero to over 525,000 followers in a couple of weeks. All we did was report information from the trial that the mainstream media was failing to do."

The Free Press Report has appealed to Twitter to lift the suspension, but as of Thursday that appeal has gone unanswered. The Nancy Tracker and Maxwell Trial accounts have been restarted on Gab, an alternative social media site that says it "champions free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online."

At the time of its suspension, the @NancyTracker account had more than 200,000 followers on Twitter. Some of its most popular posts highlighted how Pelosi had better annualized stock returns than famous professional investors like Warren Buffett and George Soros and how the House speaker generates "$10-15 million in investment income per year while paying a lower effective tax rate than a working class individual," according to screenshots taken by Reclaim the Net.

In October, @NancyTracker posted that it received "a cease and desist order from a lawyer representing someone high up in the political office."

"I will not name names. And I will also not cease or desist," @NancyTracker said.

The account was banned less than two months later for violating Twitter's rules on platform manipulation and spam.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Last week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down and was succeeded by Parag Agrawal, formerly the company's chief technology officer. Since becoming Twitter's new CEO, Agrawal has faced scrutiny over comments he made in 2020, in which he said Twitter should not be "bound by the First Amendment."

"Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation," Agrawal said. "The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."