Twitter bans account tracking Elon Musk's private jet
Twitter has suspended the widely-followed account that tracked Elon Musk's travel on his private jet.
The @elonjet account had more than 526,000 followers as of Tuesday but now reads 'account suspended' when visiting the page.
Started in 2020 by then-teenage programmer Jack Sweeney, the account automatically posts Musk's jet flights with a map and an estimate of the amount of jet fuel and carbon emissions it expended.
Musk said last month: "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk."
Sweeney runs similar accounts tracking other celebrities' aeroplanes.
His accounts tracking private jets used by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and various Russian oligarchs were still on Twitter on Wednesday, as were his accounts tracking Musk’s jet on rival social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Sweeney hasn't commented on the ban, but on his personal Twitter account he posted a screenshot showing a notice from Twitter that said @elonjet was permanently suspended.
Sweeney had days earlier accused Musk's Twitter of using a filtering technique to hide his tweets, and revealed what he said were leaked internal communications showing a Twitter executive ordering her team to suppress the account's reach.
Musk has previously criticised filtering - nicknamed "shadowbanning" - and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter's past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts.
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He has said the new Twitter will continue to downgrade the reach of negative or hateful messages but will be more transparent about it.
In his push to loosen Twitter's content restrictions, he's reinstated other high-profile accounts that were permanently banned for breaking Twitter's rules against hateful conduct, harmful misinformation or incitements of violence.
In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk's many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla's headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.
In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account's feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it "has every right to post jet whereabouts" because the data is public and "every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder," including Air Force One that transports the US president.