- Twitter has permanently suspended an account that was tracking the location of Elon Musk’s private jet. These are the details.
Twitter has permanently suspended an account that was tracking the location of Elon Musk’s private jet. The @ElonJet account climbed to over 500,000 followers and it was removed after the company had a new set of
The @ElonJet account, which had amassed more than 500,000 followers, was removed as the company posted a new set of rules that seemed to have been designed specifically for justifying the removal of this account. The @ElonJet account is run by Jack Sweeney – who is a 20-year-old college student in Florida. Sweeney tapped into publicly available flight tracking data to create a Twitter bot that tweeted every time Musk’s Gulfstream traveled between airports.
Along with the @ElonJet account being suspended, Sweeney’s personal account and other jet tracker accounts were also shut down. Musk had personally reached out to Sweeney back in December through private Twitter messages and asked him to take it down as it was a “security risk.”
Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to shut down the account. Sweeney asked for $50,000 as it would help support him in college and potentially allow him to get a car like a Tesla Model 3.
Sweeney said that he created the account since he was a fan of Musk and that it could provide a view of what new business could be going on at the company.
The new Twitter rules use the terms “visibility filtering.” These rules have restrictions over the sharing of live location data.
“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,” wrote Musk.
