SAN FRANCISCO ― Twitter has suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk’s private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform’s new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles.
Tweets from the widely followed @elonjet account were no longer viewable. The account had more than 526,000 followers.
“He said this is free speech and he´s doing the opposite,” said Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the flight-tracking account, in an interview with The Associated Press.
Started in 2020 when Sweeney was a teenager, the account automatically posted the Gulfstream jet´s flights with a map and an estimate of the amount of jet fuel and carbon emissions it expended.
Sweeney said he woke up to a flood of messages from people who saw that @elonjet was suspended and all its tweets had disappeared.
He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules. But the note didn’t explain which rules were broken.
“I haven’t heard anything else, sadly,” said Sweeney, who said he has already filed an online form to appeal the suspension.
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