Twitter suspends account that tracks Elon Musk’s jet routes

A Twitter account that tracked Elon Musk’s private jet flights reported on Wednesday that the platform suspended him despite the businessman’s promise not to touch it for the sake of freedom of expression.

“Well it looks like @ElonJet is suspended,” its creator, Jack Sweeney, tweeted from his personal account @JxckSweeney.

Created by this student and followed by over 500,000 people, @ElonJet used public data to automatically indicate when and where Musk’s aircraft, also head of the companies, took off and landed SpaceX y Tesla.

Musk had publicly said he would not touch the account after buying Twitter in late October for $44 billion. “My commitment to free speech even extends to not banning the account that follows my plane, even though that is a direct risk to personal security,” he said in early November.

Sweeney’s personal account is still accessible, however, and there he indicates how to find information about Musk’s jet on other social networks such as Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon.

Musk’s plane “flew from Los Angeles to Austin last night after my Twitter account was suspended,” he said in an Instagram post on Wednesday.

Los flight tracking websites and several Twitter accounts offer real-time views of air traffic.

US regulations require planes in designated areas to be equipped with technology that transmits aircraft positions using signals that can be picked up by relatively simple devices.

Finding out or confirming who a plane really belongs to may require some digging, said Sweeney, who filed a public records request with the United States government to confirm Musk’s ownership of his plane.

The suspension of the account came a day after Twitter co-founder and former chief Jack Dorsey publicly defended employees of the technology company, whom Musk has criticized for decisions related to content moderation.

“I strongly believe that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to remove it,” Dorsey wrote. “It must be always available and addressable. Content removals and suspensions should not be possible.”

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has sent mixed messages about what is and isn’t allowed on the platform.

Musk restored accounts previously suspended by the social network, including that of the former US president Donald Trump.

But also canceled that of rapper Kanye West after the publication of several messages considered anti-Semitic. And he rejected the return to Twitter of Alex Jones, founder of far-right website InfoWars, who was sentenced to pay some $1.5 billion in damages for claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a “hoax.”