Twitter on Wednesday suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk's private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform's new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles. Then, hours later, Musk brought back the jet-tracking account after imposing new conditions on all of Twitter's users — no more sharing of anyone's current location. Tweets from the widely followed @elonjet account were no longer viewable for much of Wednesday. The account had more than 526,000 followers a day earlier.


COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

“He said this is free speech and he’s doing the opposite,” said Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the flight-tracking account, in an interview with The Associated Press. Sweeney said he woke up Wednesday to a flood of messages from people who saw that @elonjet was suspended and all its tweets had disappeared.



Started in 2020 when Sweeney was a teenager, the account automatically posted the Gulfstream jet’s flights with a map and an estimate of the amount of jet fuel and carbon emissions it expended. He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter's rules. But the note didn't explain how it broke the rules.


Sweeney said he immediately filed an online form to appeal the suspension. Later, his personal account was also suspended, with a message saying it violated Twitter’s rules “against platform manipulation and spam.”And then hours later, the flight-tracking account was back again. Sweeney said his appeal was apparently successful. Musk and Twitter's policy team then sought to publicly explain that Twitter now has new rules.


“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Musk tweeted. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”


“Doxxing” general refers to disclosing publicly someone's identity, address, or other personal details. For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the jet-tracking account down, citing security concerns. Musk later stopped communicating to Sweeney, who never deleted the account.


Sweeney ran similar “bot” accounts tracking other celebrities' airplanes. For hours after the suspension of the @elonjet account, other Sweeney-run accounts tracking private jets used by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and various Russian oligarchs were still live on Twitter. But by later Wednesday, Twitter suspended all of them, including Sweeney's personal account.


Sweeney said he originally started the Musk jet tracker because “I was interested in him as a fan of Tesla and SpaceX." In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk's many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla's headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.


It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account's feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.