Status: 15.12.2022 08:20 a.m
For years, Elon Musk’s flight routes could be followed publicly on Twitter. Apparently that bothered the new boss of the short message service. The account was blocked – Musk had recently promised the opposite.
Twitter has blocked an account that was previously following CEO Elon Musk’s private jet. The account was created by college student Jack Sweeney, who used an automated computer bot to analyze publicly available flight data to determine and document the flight movements of Musk’s jets.
Musk explained in a tweet on Wednesday evening that the bot account, which had been deactivated a few hours earlier, violated the Internet platform’s user guidelines.
Hours later, however, the account was visible again after the new rule was put in place for everyone, according to which sharing a user’s current location is no longer allowed. But shortly afterwards @elonjet was blocked again.
Musk threatens legal action
Musk previously tweeted that a “crazy stalker” attacked a car in Los Angeles that his young son was in. The Twitter owner also threatened legal action against the initiator of @elonjet, Sweeney, and “organizations that supported harming my family”.
Sweeney’s account had more than 526,000 followers as of Wednesday. The programmer told the AP news agency that when he logged in on Wednesday, he was shown a Twitter message saying his account was permanently banned for violating the rules. He then complained to Twitter and received the following response: “You may not use Twitter services in a manner intended to artificially disseminate or suppress information, or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s Twitter experience “, it was said.
Sweeney said he created the @elonjet account in 2020 because he was interested in Musk as a fan of the Tesla and SpaceX companies. Musk offered him $5,000 last year to delete the @elonjet account, citing security concerns.
Also blocked other accounts with flight details
The University of Central Florida student runs similar accounts using flight data from other celebrities including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and some Russian oligarchs. These were also suspended Wednesday night, as was Sweeney’s personal account. In the case of the latter, Twitter announced that Sweeney had violated the rules against “platform manipulation and spam”.
After Musk bought Twitter at the end of October, Musk assured him that the account would not be suspended, the 20-year-old added. Musk himself tweeted in early November: “My commitment to freedom of expression goes so far as not to suspend the account that follows my plane, even if it poses an immediate personal security risk.”
Sweeney now said: “He says that’s freedom of expression and does the opposite.”