Twitter suspended on Wednesday an account that used publicly available flight data to track the trips taken by the social media company’s new owner Elon Musk’s private jet, who announced legal action against the account’s creator after the car carrying the billionaire’s son was allegedly intercepted by a “crazy stalker”. The owner has denied any connection between the said incident and his flight-tracking account.
Following the suspension, Twitter officially announced an update to its “Private information and media policy”, prohibiting the sharing of a person’s real-time location.
“When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm,” Twitter Safety tweeted. “Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended.”
We’ve updated our Private Information policy to prohibit sharing someone else’s live location in most cases. Here’s what changed and why. 🧵
— Safety (@Safety) December 14, 2022
The new policy allows the exception of sharing one’s own live and someone else’s delayed location information. Information related to the location of a public engagement (concert or political event) is also permitted, Twitter added.
Twitter banned not only the flight-tracking account @ElonJet, but also a number of other accounts (tracking private jets used by billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg) operated by its creator, Jack Sweeney. The 20-year-old programmer is a student at the University of California, who tweeted every time Musk’s plane took off and landed. Sweeney’s personal account has been suspended as well.
@ElonJet had more than 526,000 followers.
Sweeney says his account was first suspended on Wednesday. When he logged into Twitter, a notice informed him that @ElonJet had been permanently suspended for violation of the platform’s rules. There were no details as to how the account broke the rules, however.
Shortly after Sweeney appealed against the suspension, his personal account was also suspended for violation of rules “against platform manipulation and spam”. Hours later, however, Sweeney’s flight-tracking account reappeared, only to be shut down again. The development was followed by Musk laying out new rules concerning real-time location information sharing on Twitter.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Musk tweeted. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, seems to have changed his mind about location sharing accounts pretty quickly. On November 7, the billionaire, in light of his free speech ideals, had declared he would not take down the account following his plane despite it being a “direct personal safety risk”. The tweet now ironically displays context from readers saying, “The implied account in this tweet is elonjet, which is currently banned.”
The flight-tracking account had long irked Musk. According to interviews given to leading news publications by Sweeney, Musk had reached out to him last year offering $5,000 to take @ElonJet down. When Sweeney countered the offer and demanded $50,000 that could help with his tuition and allow him to buy a Tesla car, Musk allegedly refused, saying he did not feel it was right to pay to have the account shut down.
