Twitter Suspends Bot Account Tracking Elon Musk’s Private Jet

Social media platform Twitter suspended a bot account tracking its owner Elon Musk’s private jet, the account’s operator Jack Sweeney said on Wednesday.

The account tracked movements of Musk‘s private jet using data in the public domain and puts out alerts.

Musk said in a tweet in November that his commitment to free speech “extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”.

Sweeney, a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student, tweeted On Saturday that Ella Irwin, Twitter’s Vice President of trust and safety, requested the account be filtered and less visible to users.

Twitter and Sweeney did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

In media interviews, Sweeney has said that he turned down a $5,000 offer from the Tesla chief executive officer in 2021 to shut down his bot account.

Sweeney also operates similar bot accounts tracking Musk’s jet on other platforms — Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram and Telegram.

Meanwhile, Twitter has undergone several changes ever since the billionaire took over the charge of the social media platform. This week, Musk disbanded a key advisory group, the Trust and Safety Council, made up of dozens of independent civil, human rights and other organisations. The company formed the council in 2016 to address hate speech, harassment, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

On the other hand, Musk has been trying to prove through giving selected journalists access to some of the company’s internal communications dubbed “The Twitter Files” that officials from the previous leadership team allegedly suppressed right-wing voices.

© Thomson Reuters 2022