Twitter has suspended an account that tracked the movement of Elon Musk's private jet. The account, @ElonJet run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney, had over 500,000 followers. The account was suspended on December 14 after Musk got involved in an incident that threatened safety. Musk also said legal action is being taken against the admin and others.
The account had amassed over half a million followers and used publicly available flight-tracking information to tweet every time Musk's private jet took off and landed.
Sweeney confirmed on his personal Twitter account that his tracking profile had been suspended. The account appeared to have been reactivated later for a short time before getting permanently listed as suspended. In another tweet, Sweeney said that his account was dedicated to tracking employee jets at Musk's company SpaceX was suspended as well. As per a CNN report, Sweeney’s personal account, @JxckSweeney, was also frozen shortly after.
On December 15, Musk tweeted that due to the information leak on his location his car was attacked by a stalker. Thus, Musk stated that any account revealing people's real-time locations will be suspended "as it is a physical safety violation".
Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.
Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 15, 2022
However, Sweeney denied the incident was related to his account, as per a BBC report.
Musk clarified that real-time posting of another person's location violates Twitter's doxxing policy but delayed tweets sharing a person's location "not on the same-day" will be allowed. Musk said that the change will be updated in the language of the company's doxxing policy.
Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. 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.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 15, 2022
Jack Sweeney, a college student in Florida, is in charge of dozens of other accounts that track the private flights of wealthy people, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As per reports, many of these accounts including the one tracking aircraft associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to be suspended on the same day.
Sweeney shared a screenshot with CNN of an internal message from Twitter which said that the social media company had conducted a "careful review" and decided to permanently ban the account for violating Twitter's rules.
He added that Musk, before he became the Twitter CEO, had offered to pay him $5,000 to take down the account over safety risks.
(Edited by : Jerome Anthony)
First Published: Dec 15, 2022 12:08 PM IST
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