Twitter suspends profile of student who tracked Elon Musk’s flights

The profile @ElonJet, a robot dedicated to tracking private flights of billionaire Elon Musk, was suspended this Wednesday (14) from Twitter.

The account created by student Jack Sweeney had about 500,000 followers and automatically tweeted when and where the social network owner’s plane took off or landed and the duration of each trip.

The suspension goes against a statement made in November by Musk. “My commitment to freedom of expression even extends to not banning the account that tracks my plane, even if doing so is a direct risk to personal safety,” he said.

The suspension comes less than a week after Jack Sweeney claimed via his personal Twitter account that the tracker was being discreetly restricted by the social network.

Sweeney posted a screenshot of an alleged Twitter Slack message that showed Ella Irwin, the company’s security lead, asking her team to apply a visibility filter to the account. The Facebook and Instagram versions of the ElonJet are still live.

When Musk came to Brazil, in May, the profile estimated a cost of around US$58,000 (R$307,000 at current exchange rates) for the round trip. The billionaire flew to the interior of São Paulo aboard the Gulfstream G650ER executive jet, valued at US$ 66 million (R$ 350 million),

“The purchase of Twitter for us here was like a breath of hope”, said President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) at the time, adding that “freedom is the seed of the future”.

In January, before the businessman announced the purchase of the social network, Jack Sweeney drew attention by rejecting an offer of US$ 5,000 (R$ 26 thousand) from Musk to exclude ElonJet.

Sweeney stated that the amount offered was not enough compared to what he earned from the profile. “Money does not replace factors like pleasure,” he told CNN in the United States at the time.