Twitter has blacklisted an account that has been posting courtroom updates from the trial of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is accused of sex trafficking minors. The popular account’s suspension comes amid a wide-ranging purge of accounts belonging to anonymous individuals from new CEO Parag Agrawal’s platform.
An account that was set up to monitor the investment portfolio of house speaker Nancy Pelosi following insider trading accusations was also taken down recently.
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) December 8, 2021
twitter just suspended the account that was live tweeting updates from the epstein/maxwell trial pic.twitter.com/cv7E5JlgQR
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) December 8, 2021
The account that has been following the Maxwell trial had more than 500,000 followers before it was suspended. The account that had been following Nancy Pelosi’s investments had over 200,000.
This came just a few days after a large amount of highly-followed anonymous conservative twitter accounts were taken down by the social platform, and just a week after Parag Agrawal took Jack Dorsey’s place as CEO.
New Twitter leadership appears to be purging right wing anon accounts.
No pretext could ban all of these accounts at the same time. Some kind of new banning algorithm has been deployed, probably using network analysis to suppress an entire cluster at once. pic.twitter.com/KUinpb9FGi
— Allum Bokhari (@AllumBokhari) December 7, 2021
The Pelosi investment tracker was humorously presenting itself as a source of great investment advice, noting the unusually high level of success that Pelosi’s investments have had, and calling her the “next Warren Buffett.”
Agrawal, the new CEO of social platform Twitter, has stated in interviews with the corporate news that free speech is no longer a priority for the social platform.
“Our role isn’t to be bound by the First Amendment, but Twitter’s role is to serve a healthy public conversation and I think our moves are reflective of things that we think will lead to a healthier public conversation overall,” said Agrawal during an interview with MIT Tech Review last year.
“The kinds of things that we do about it is, focus a lot less on thinking about free speech and the first amendment, and focus more on thinking about how the times have changed in today’s world.”
“…increasingly our role is moving more towards how we suggest content and that is sort of, a struggle that we are working through in terms of how we can make sure that these recommendation systems that we are building, how we direct an individual’s attention is leading to a more healthy public conversation that is mostly participatory.”
Author: Steven Sinclaire
