Twitter Suspends Account That Tracked Elon Musk's Private Jet

(RTTNews) - Twitter permanently suspended an account that tracked the location of Elon Musk's private jet. The @ElonJet account, with more than 500,000 followers, was removed following a new set of policies.

The company tweeted, "We've updated our Private Information policy to prohibit sharing someone else's live location in most cases."

According to the company, when someone shares an individual's live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, the company plans to remove Tweets that share this information, as well as accounts dedicated to sharing someone else's live location.

However, Twitter Safety allows users sharing their own live location on Twitter, as well as tweets that share someone else's historical, not same-day, location information. Content that shares location information related to a public engagement or event, such as a concert or political event, is also permitted.

Later, Musk in a tweet, justified the new policy, stating that any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. However, posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn't a safety problem, and it's ok.

Twitter has now updated its private information and media policy to add a clause that prohibited the sharing of live location data.

The suspended account, run by 20-year-old Florida college student Jack Sweeney, used certain flight tracking information to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every time Musk's Gulfstream took off and landed at an airport.

Prior to the suspension, the account's last post showed that Musk's jet took off from Oakland, California, on Monday and landed in Los Angeles.

Last December, Musk reportedly reached out to Sweeney through a Twitter private message asking him to take the account down noting that it was a security risk. Musk also offered him $5,000 to shut down the account, but later withdrew his offer stating, "Doesn't feel right to pay to shut this down," and then subsequently blocked his personal account.

Sweeney now said he received a message from Twitter informing him @ElonJet had been permanently suspended. His personal account as well as other jet-tracking accounts were also shut down later in the day.

Sweeney is said to have similar accounts for Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.