Twitter Account That Tracked Musk’s Jet Returns After Brief Grounding
Twitter apparently had a change of heart about suspending an account that used publicly available flight information to track the location of private jets, including the plane used by Twitter owner Elon Musk.
The account @ElonJet was created in 2020 by Florida college student Jack Sweeney to track the takeoffs and landings of Musk’s private jet. Musk wasn’t happy with account but said in November he wouldn’t ban it, citing his commitment to free speech. But on Wednesday, the account suddenly disappeared from the service for a couple of hours with the message “account suspended” for violating Twitter’s rules, along with Sweeney’s personal account.
The action seemed to come around the same time that Twitter updated its privacy policy to prohibit posting or linking to information about a person’s physical location or travel route, regardless of whether the information is publicly available. Musk explained the new policy in a response to a comment about the policy change. “Real-time posting of someone else’s location violates doxxing policy, but delayed posting of locations are ok,” Musk said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon.
@ElonJet was restored several hours later, but other accounts created by Sweeney to track the private planes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates were also suspended but not restored as of this writing. Sweeney’s account is also still suspended. Earlier this year, Musk reportedly offered Sweeney £5,000 to take down the Twitter account, but the 20-year-old student refused, saying £5,000 wasn’t enough for the satisfaction he received from his work.
Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.