Twitter on Wednesday suspended more than 25 accounts that track the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals — including one that tracked the movements of the social media company’s owner, Elon Musk, who has said he is committed to “freedom of speech.” . ”
Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast, said he woke up Wednesday to discover his automated Twitter account, @ElonJet, had been suspended. In recent months, the account has garnered more than 500,000 followers by using public flight information and data to post the whereabouts of Mr Musk’s private jet. Twitter later reinstated the @ElonJet account before suspending it again.
Mr. Musk had known about @ElonJet for months. After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, he said he would leave the account on the platform. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account that tracks my plane, even though that is a direct personal security risk,” Musk said. tweeted last month.
Sweeney’s personal Twitter account was also suspended on Wednesday, along with the other accounts he controls that follow the planes of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Mr Sweeney shared a message he received from Twitter saying his account had been suspended for breaking rules “against platform tampering and spam”.
In an interview, Mr. Sweeney said he had not changed the behavior of the aircraft tracking accounts and was not given a specific reason why they were suspended. “He’s doing the exact opposite of what he said,” he said of Mr. Musk, adding that the suspensions felt arbitrary given that the bills had been in existence for months.
Since taking over Twitter, Mr. Musk battled back and forth to decide what content and accounts should and shouldn’t be on the platform. He initially said he would form a council to make content moderation decisions, but then abandoned those plans. He also welcomed former President Donald J. Trump’s account and declared an amnesty for people, including white nationalists, who were suspended from Twitter for violating its rules on hate speech or inciting violence.
More on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover
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- Who pays?: Mr. Musk made Twitter Blue, an existing subscription service, the backbone of his strategy to increase sales. We looked at who signed up for it.
- Rivals emerge: Sensing an opportunity, new startups and other social platforms rush to dethrone Twitter and take advantage of the chaos of its new owner under Mr. Musk.
- The ‘Twitter Files’: Mr. Musk and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, began an intense debate by releasing internal Twitter documents about a 2020 decision to limit posts linking to a New York Post report on Hunter Biden.
Mr Musk and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. But Mr Musk said on Twitter that “posting someone else’s location in real time is against the doxxing policy, but delayed posting of locations is okay.”
A review of Twitter’s “private information and media policy” showed that Mr. Musk and his team appeared to have created new rules about live locations published in the past 24 hours. “If information is not shared during a crisis situation to aid in humanitarian efforts, we will remove any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” the statement said. policy said.
But since Tuesday the internet archive shows that the webpage on Twitter’s policy on private information and media did not mention the phrase “live location”.
On Wednesday afternoon, @ElonJet was reinstated shortly after Mr. Sweeney issued an appeal to Twitter saying he could delay his posts about the locations of Mr. Musk. He said he would do the same for his other aircraft tracking accounts.
Wednesday evening, Mr. Musk announced the new policy on Twitter and said he would “take legal action” to Mr. Sweeney.
Before taking ownership of Twitter, Mr. Musk mr. Sweeney $5,000 to take @ElonJet offline; he later blocked the student after Mr. Sweeney tried to negotiate. Mr. Sweeney has since created more than two dozen automated Twitter accounts using public flight data to track the planes of tech billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and national and international government agencies.
Jason Calacanis, a tech investor and advisor to Mr. Musk for the takeover of Twitter, tweeted on Wednesday that his personal belief was that “sharing public location information for long periods of time is de facto doxing,” using a phrase typically reserved for sharing private information on the Internet.
Mr Sweeney said the information shared on the accounts was already public.
“If someone wants to do something, they can do it without me,” he said.
