SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during a chat with legendary game designer Todd Howard (not pictured) at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles, California, June 13 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Twitter has suspended the account that specializes in tracking the location of billionaire Elon Musk private jet.
Account, @ElonJet, is run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney and has amassed over half a million followers. It tracked the location of Musk’s plane using publicly available flight data and appeared to have been suspended as of Wednesday morning.
“Well, it appeared @ElonJet suspended,” Sweeney tweeted on wednesday. He encourages users to follow him on other platforms.
Musk acquires Twitter for $44 billion in October, and he’s been vocal about his efforts to protect free speech on the site. In early November, Musk announced he was such a fervent supporter of freedom of speech that he would not ban the plane-tracking account, which he called a “direct personal safety risk.” .
Internally, however, Twitter employees may have received different instructions. Sweeney shared a string of tweets on December 10, announced that his account had been banned in the dark, which meant that the account’s reach was intentionally restricted.
He said an employee sent him a screenshot of Twitter’s vice president of Safety and Trust asking for heavy visibility filtering on @ElonJet. The Trust and Safety Council was disbanded on Monday.
But on December 12, Sweeney said in a tweet that it looks like the @ElonJet account is no longer hidden or banned “in any way”.
Sweeney also runs accounts dedicated to tracking the private flights of other celebrities such as Bill Gates, former President Donald Trump and Mr. meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Sweeney’s Instagram account, which specializes in following Musk, appears to be still active.
Sweeney and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
