Twitter on Wednesday permanently suspended an account that tracked the location of Elon Musk’s private jet. The move came despite the social media company’s owner promising last month that he would leave the account active as part of his “commitment to freedom of expression”.
A account @ElonJet, which amassed more than 500,000 followers, was removed when the company posted a new set of edicts that appeared to be specifically designed to justify removing the jet tracking account. The move comes after Musk reinstated Twitter’s past rule breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies that prohibit misinformation about Covid-19.
The account, run by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student from Florida, used publicly available flight tracking information to create a Twitter bot that tweeted every time Musk’s Gulfstream took off and landed at an airport. The account’s last post before the suspension showed Musk’s jet taking off from Oakland, Calif., on Monday and landing in Los Angeles 48 minutes later.
Sweeney woke up Wednesday morning to a message from Twitter that his @ElonJet account had been permanently suspended. At the end of the day, his personal account and other jet tracking accounts he managed were also terminated by the company.
The account has long been a thorn in Musk’s side. According to screenshots Sweeney shared with CNN, Musk reached out to him last December via a private Twitter message asking, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”
It is noteworthy that Elon Musk tried to pay the owner of the account to remove it from Twitter. Initially, the billionaire offered Sweeney $5,000, and later, $50,000. However, Musk understood that it would not be right to pay to close @ElonJet.
This article used as a source the writing by Donie O’Sullivan to the website CNN Business.
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