ORLANDO, Fla. — The Twitter accounts of a Florida college student are suspended and the platform's billionaire owner Elon Musk is personally threatening legal action against him.
20-year-old Jack Sweeney had more than half a million followers on Twitter with an account dedicated to tracking Musk's private jet.
On Wednesday, Sweeney said he found that his @ElonJet Twitter account, as well as a few dozen others he ran under his cellphone number, had been suspended.
"It's really just like a giant mess," said Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, studying technology. "They suspended the accounts and then, like hours later, they said that they changed the rules about the live information and all that."
On Wednesday, Twitter updated its policies to ban personal tracking on the platform, even if that location information is publically available.
Twitter Safety said in a tweet: "When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended."
At the start of the pandemic, Sweeney created a formula that programmed a bot to "live tweet" any location updates to dozens of celebrity jets, including that of Elon Musk.
"I was just doing a COVID project, basically, and it's blown up from there," said Sweeney.
Part of the intrigue in tracking Elon Musk's jet came from Sweeney being a fan.
"He has a lot going on you know jumping around from one company to another. And it's interesting to see what he's working on or what new might be happening if a company is opening a new location or what business deals are going on," said Sweeney.
The jet's location information is public information. The movements of Elon Musk's Gulfstream jet are available for anyone to see online.
Just this week, it traveled from California to Austin, Texas and back.
However, Musk has recently claimed that live tracking has put him and his family in danger.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has pushed for more free speech on the platform. He even tweeted in November:
"My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk."
But now, he has not only banned that account, but also the accounts of several journalists who reported on or linked to it.
"He's trying to make Twitter the free speech thing, but I really think it's just going to be the same thing. He can still bend the rules however he wants," said Sweeney.
Jack plans to appeal the suspension so that he can access his account's archive. However, amid legal threats from Musk and the platform's new rules, he says his time live tweeting about private jets is over.