Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Central Florida, had amassed more than 530,000 followers on his @ElonJet account, which provided regular updates on the billionaire’s flights.

Sweeney told Newsweek earlier this year that while Musk had offered him $5,000 to take down the account (an offer the student refused), he believed that ElonJet was safe after the entrepreneur vowed to guarantee “free speech” amid his recent acquisition of Twitter.

“He said he wouldn’t ban it,” Sweeney told Newsweek over the phone, moments after learning the account was suspended. “And he put out that tweet where he [spoke about] his commitment to free speech. But that’s not true. That’s just not true anymore.”

According to Sweeney, nothing out of the ordinary had been shared before the suspension from his account, which he said last shared information on Musk’s jet flying to Los Angeles on Monday night.

Sweeney had been using publicly available aerospace telemetry on the ADS-B website, as well as a sophisticated program he’s made to match transponder frequencies and separately available anonymous flight plans, to track the private flights of the mega-rich.

He was informed that something untoward was afoot with his account when an apparent whistle-blower at Twitter sent him a direct message informing him that Ella Irwin, vice president of the platform’s Trust and Safety department, requested that ElonJet be placed under “heavy VF,” or visibility filtering.

The alleged action, which it was claimed had been put in place from December 2, essentially meant that tweets from the account could not be keyword searched and that it would not come up in suggested usernames for users who were exploring.

Following in the vein of Musk’s ongoing “Twitter Files” series on behind-the-scenes actions at the company before he took over, Sweeney shared his own screenshots on his personal Twitter account, where he has almost 150,000 followers.

He believed that the shadow ban had been removed, only to wake on Wednesday morning to the news that the account had been permanently suspended.

“I log into that account, and it says permanently suspended, but there’s no reason why,” Sweeney told Newsweek. “It just says, you know, ‘after careful review, blah, blah, blah… your account broke the Twitter rules.’”

As for whether he feels that Musk was personally behind the suspension of his account, Sweeney said: “We’re still in the early hours, but I mean, what else? What else could be going on? You know, it’s pretty obvious. But I’d like to hear his word, hear exactly what he thinks and how he’s going to play this. Because it’s completely the opposite to what he said.”

During the conversation, Sweeney was in the process of sending an appeal to Twitter in an effort to have ElonJet reinstated.

“It just shows that they can form and shape the rules however they want for particular accounts, rather than be open, rather than just letting it be one set rule,” Sweeney told Newsweek.

In an essay for Newsweek published last month, Sweeney said that he had no fears about the future of his account as Musk took over Twitter.

“I haven’t had any interactions with Musk since he took over Twitter. But when he first discussed buying Twitter, he unblocked the ElonJet account,” he wrote. “I think he didn’t want to seem like a hypocrite, as he has been such an advocate of ‘free speech.’

“I’m not worried now that Musk owns Twitter. If he banned ElonJet, the news would be all over it, so I don’t think he will do it. That being said, there’s always a chance. I put out a poll recently, and some of my followers think my account will be banned.

“I’ve kept my account going for over two years for the same reason why I didn’t sell it for $5k: it’s my project and people are interested in it. Even though some people won’t like it, I’m not going to stop. There’s always going to be haters.”

Newsweek reached out to representatives of Twitter for comment.