Twitter has banned over accounts tracking billionaire’s private jets, including Elon’s using publicly available flight data. The new Twitter owner claims that was done as these accounts were banned as they were in a physical safety violation.
Hours after banning these accounts, including one called @ElonJet which tracked Musk’s own private jet, the account’s owner Sweeny was also suspended from Twitter. The platform has since been blocking links to versions of Sweeny’s trackers running on other platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well.
These accounts have been on Musk’s radar since November, when he stated that while the account was a “direct personal safety risk” he wouldn’t ban it as part of his commitment to freedom of Speech on Twitter.
According to a Mastodon post made by Sweeny, the owner of a majority of these banned accounts, they were suspended for violating Twitter’s rules against “platform manipulation and spam”. However, CEO Elon Musk tweeted that “any account doxxing real-time location of anyone will be suspended”.
Twitter has updated its private information policy to reflect this statement. The policy now holds sharing live location information a violation, regardless of whether or not the information is publicly available.
The platform will be removing tweets sharing live location, including third-party URLs of travel routes, actual physical location or other identifying information that might reveal a person’s location and will suspends accounts doing so.
The only kind of location data that can now be shared on Twitter is either the Tweet author’s live location or historical location data that’s at least one day old.
Musk is also taking legal action against Sweeny, adding that an unknown stalker followed a car carrying his son in LA thinking it was him and later blocked the car from moving.
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