Twitter suspends account tracking Elon Musk’s jet
- Twitter owner Elon Musk threatens legal action against @ElonJet account’s operator who tracked private plane in real-time
- Suspension comes just a month after Musk said his commitment to free speech extended to not banning the account
Twitter suspended multiple accounts that track the locations of private jets using publicly available flight data, including one that followed the plane of the company’s owner, Elon Musk.
Musk publicly declared last month that he would not ban the account even though he saw it as a safety risk, saying that it was evidence of his commitment to free speech.
Early Wednesday morning in New York, the @elonjet page showed a message that read “account suspended” because it violated the platform’s rules. The account had been operated since 2020 by Jack Sweeney, who also ran other Twitter accounts that tracked the private jets of Mark Zuckerberg and other celebrities.
By the afternoon, Twitter updated its policy to bar accounts from sharing someone else’s current location information, though tweeting about “historical (not same-day)” locations would be allowed. The @elonjet account reappeared and began tweeting, but then was suspended again.
Musk said in a tweet that legal action was being taken against Sweeney and the “organisations who supported harm to my family”.
In an earlier interview, Sweeney said that the 30 Twitter accounts he manages were all suspended, as was his personal account.
