Twitter suspends dozens of accounts tracking billionaires’ planes

Twitter on Wednesday suspended more than 25 accounts that track planes for government agencies, billionaires and high profile individuals – including one that followed the movements of the social networking company’s owner, Elon Musk, who said he was compromised. with “freedom of expression”.

Jack Sweeney, 20, a college student and flight-tracking enthusiast, said he woke up on Wednesday to find that his automated Twitter account, @ElonJet, had been suspended. In recent months, the account has amassed more than 500,000 followers using public flight information and data to post the whereabouts of Musk’s private plane. Twitter later reinstated the @ElonJet account before suspending it again.

The billionaire had known @ElonJet for months. After buying Twitter for $44 billion (R$234.9 billion) in October, he said he would allow the account to continue on the platform. “My commitment to free speech even extends to not banning the account that follows my plane, even though doing so is a direct risk to my personal safety,” Musk tweeted last month.

Sweeney’s personal Twitter account was also suspended on Wednesday, along with the other accounts he manages that track the planes of tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Sweeney shared a message he received from Twitter, saying his account had been suspended for violating rules “against manipulation and spam on the platform”.

In an interview, Sweeney said he hasn’t changed how plane tracking accounts behave and hasn’t been given a specific reason as to why they were suspended. “He’s doing the exact opposite of what he said,” the student said of Musk, adding that the suspensions seemed arbitrary given the accounts had been around for months.

Since taking over Twitter, the new owner has been deciding which content and which accounts should or should not be on the platform. He initially said he would form a board to make decisions about content moderation, but later abandoned those plans.

He also approved the return of former President Donald Trump’s account and declared amnesty for people, including white nationalists, who had been suspended from Twitter for violating its rules on hate speech or incitement to violence.

Musk and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. But the billionaire said on Twitter that “Real-time posting of someone else’s location violates the ‘doxxing’ policy, but later posting of locations is ok.” [“doxxing” ou “doxing” é a prática de pesquisar e transmitir na internet dados privados sobre um indivíduo ou organização]🇧🇷

An analysis of Twitter’s “private information and media policy” showed that the company appears to have created new rules about live location, which were published in the last 24 hours. “If information is not shared during a crisis situation to aid humanitarian efforts, we will remove all tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” the policy reads.

But on Tuesday (13) the Internet Archive shows that the web page on the company’s policy on private information and media does not mention the phrase “live location”.

On Wednesday afternoon, @ElonJet was briefly reinstated after Sweeney sent an appeal to Twitter saying he could slow his posts about the location of Musk’s plane. He said he would do the same with his other air tracking accounts.

On Wednesday night, Musk reiterated the new policy on Twitter and said he would take “legal action” against Sweeney.

Before buying Twitter, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to close the @ElonJet account; he later blocked the student after Sweeney tried to negotiate. Since then, Sweeney has created more than two dozen automated Twitter accounts using public aviation data to track the aircraft of tech billionaires, Russian oligarchs and national and international government agencies.

Jason Calacanis, a technology investor and adviser to Musk on the Twitter acquisition, tweeted on Wednesday that his personal belief was that “the continued sharing of public location information is in fact ‘doxing’.”

Sweeney said the information shared on the accounts was already public.

“If someone wanted to do something, they could do it without me,” he said.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves