Twitter removes the private airplane tracking account for Elon Musk
Twitter removes the private airplane tracking account for Elon Musk, The Twitter account that tracks the whereabouts of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private plane has been suspended.
Jack Sweeney, a college student from Florida, operated the @ElonJet account, which had gained more than 500,000 followers. It used publicly available flight data to track the whereabouts of Musk’s aircraft and appears to have been suspended Wednesday morning.
The @ElonJet account appeared to be suspended, Sweeney tweeted on Wednesday. Users were urged to follow him on other sites by him.
The 20-year-old told CNBC that he opened the account in June 2020 because he liked what Musk was doing as CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla. Even now, a Tesla is unquestionably Sweeney’s ideal vehicle.
Read more: Bavarian Inn Lodge Is Building The Largest Indoor Water Park In Michigan.
In October, Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter; since then, he has defended free expression on the platform. Early in November, Musk defended the plane tracking account, which he labeled a “direct personal safety concern,” by saying he fervently supported free speech.
However, internal Twitter communications may have been different. On December 10, Sweeney posted a series of tweets stating that his account had been shadow banned, which suggests that the account’s audience has been purposefully constrained.
He said a worker had forwarded him a screenshot of the company’s vice president of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council requesting that @ElonJet be subject to strict visibility filtering. On Monday, the Trust and Safety Council was dissolved.
Nevertheless, Sweeney noted in a tweet on December 12 that it appeared like the @ElonJet account was no longer hidden or blocked “in any way.”
Sweeney claimed that he was shocked to discover that his account had been suspended on Wednesday, especially since Musk had previously stated that he would not. According to him, Musk had earlier offered to pay him $5,000 to close the account since it posed a safety risk. He disclosed this to CNBC.
The final message he sent was, “It doesn’t feel right to take this down,” according to Sweeney.
Sweeney also manages accounts for following the private flights of other well-known people, including CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, former President Donald Trump, and Bill Gates. Sweeney still looks to be active on his Musk-tracking Instagram account.
