CNN
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Twitter on Wednesday permanently suspended an account that tracked the location of Elon Musk’s private jet, despite the owner of the social media company vowing last month: “My commitment to free speech even extends to not banning the account that follows my plane, even if it is a direct attack personal security risk”.
O Account @ElonJetwhich amassed over 500,000 followers, was removed when the company posted a new set of edicts which appeared to be specifically designed to justify removing the jet tracking account. The move comes after Musk reinstated Twitter’s past rule breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies that prohibit misinformation about Covid-19.
The @ElonJet account, run by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student from Florida, used publicly available flight tracking information to create a Twitter bot that tweeted every time Musk’s Gulfstream took off and landed at an airport. The account’s last post before the suspension showed Musk’s jet taking off from Oakland, Calif., on Monday and landing in Los Angeles 48 minutes later.
Sweeney woke up Wednesday morning to a message from Twitter that @ElonJet had been permanently suspended. At the end of the day, his personal account and other jet tracking accounts he managed were also terminated by the company.
The account has long been a thorn in Musk’s side. According to screenshots Sweeney shared with CNN, Musk reached out to him last December via a private Twitter message asking, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”
Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, recalled his surprise upon receiving the message in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.
“I was about to go to sleep and I was in a normal college dorm and I remember saying to my roommate, ‘Hey, Elon Musk just sent me a direct message.
The billionaire then offered Sweeney $5,000 to close the account. Sweeney countered the offer, raising it to $50,000, writing, “It would be a great support in college and possibly allow me to buy a car, maybe even a [Tesla] Model 3.” After some back-and-forth, Musk responded, “It doesn’t feel right to pay to close this.”
Sweeney said he set up @ElonJet initially because he was a fan of Musk. “It gives you just another view that a lot of people don’t know where [Musk] is going and can give you clues as to what new deals are happening,” he said.
The enterprising student believes he was tipped off on Saturday that his account was being targeted by the social media company’s management.
Sweeney said he received an email from an anonymous person pretending to be a Twitter employee that included a screenshot showing an internal company message from Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking the team to “apple Heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.”
In Twitter parlance, “VF” stands for “visibility filtering” which limits the reach of certain accounts.
CNN reached out to Irwin and Twitter for comment.
As part of its new policy announced on Wednesday, Twitter said it “will prohibit sharing another person’s live location in most cases.”
“You can still share your own location live on Twitter,” he said. “Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.”
Musk also posted his rationale for the new policy. “Any account doxxing anyone’s real-time location information will be suspended as it is a breach of physical security. This includes posting links to websites with real-time location information. Posting locations someone has traveled to with a bit of a delay is not a security issue, so that’s fine,” he wrote.
Restrictions around location sharing were not part of Twitter’s existing policies until this week.
Data from the Internet Archive shows that the company has updated its “private information and media policy” to add a clause prohibiting sharing live location data, “we remove all tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location”, it said.
Asked if he planned to comply with the new policy, Sweeney told CNN he would start delaying posting the whereabouts of Musk’s jet for 24 hours, “but only on Twitter.”
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