Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Twitter has suspended the account dedicated to tracking the placement of billionaire Elon Musk’s private jet.
The account, @ElonJet, was run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney and had amassed greater than half 1,000,000 followers. It tracked Musk’s plane’s location using publicly available flight data and appears to have been suspended Wednesday morning.
“Well it appears @ElonJet is suspended,” Sweeney tweeted Wednesday. He encouraged users to follow him on other platforms.
Sweeney said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon that his account dedicated to tracking worker jets at Musk’s company SpaceX was also suspended. Shortly afterward, his personal account was suspended.
“That is coordinated and Elon is well aware I’m sure,” he wrote before his account was deleted.
In a tweet Wednesday evening, Musk said real-time posting of one other person’s location violates Twitter’s doxxing policy, but that “delayed posting of locations are okay.” The change might be updated within the language of the corporate’s doxxing policy, he added.
Sweeney, 20, told CNBC he began the @ElonJet account in June 2020 because he was a fan of Musk’s work at Tesla and SpaceX where he’s CEO of each firms.
“Even now, my dream automobile is certainly a Tesla,” Sweeney said.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October, and he has been vocal about his efforts to guard free speech on the location. In early November, Musk claimed he was such a staunch advocate without spending a dime speech that he wouldn’t ban the plane tracking account, which he called a “direct personal safety risk.”
Internally, nonetheless, Twitter employees could have received different instructions. Sweeney shared a thread of tweets on Dec. 10 claiming his account had been shadow banned, which implies the reach of the account is intentionally limited.
He said an worker sent him a screenshot of the corporate’s vice chairman of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council asking to position heavy visibility filtering on @ElonJet. The Trust and Safety Council was disbanded Monday.
But on Dec. 12, Sweeney said in a tweet that it appeared as if the @ElonJet account was not hidden or banned “in any way.”
Because of this, Sweeney said he was surprised to seek out his account suspended Wednesday, especially because Musk said he wouldn’t do it. He told CNBC that Musk had previously offered to pay him $5,000 to take down the account since it was a security risk.
“Eventually, the last message from him was ‘It doesn’t feel right to take this down,'” Sweeney said.
Sweeney also ran accounts dedicated to tracking the private flights of other public figures like Bill Gates, former President Donald Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. All three of those accounts have been suspended.
Sweeney told CNBC all of those accounts were banned for violating Twitter’s rules against “platform manipulation and spam.” He has not heard from Musk or his team directly, and his biggest takeaway from the experience has been that Musk “doesn’t follow his word,” he said.
Musk didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
