Twitter suspends @ElonJet; then lifts suspension hours later, rolling out new live location rules

Twitter suspended @ElonJet, the bot account created by a student, Jack Sweeney, tracking Elon Musk’s flights in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

So this student called Jack Sweeney created a Twitter account, named @ElonJet that uses publicly available data to track the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet.

The University of Central Florida student also created similar bots that track private jet activity of tech moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates.

In January this year, Elon Musk had offered Jack Sweeney $5,000 to delete the Twitter account but Jack told Musk to add another 0. “Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3.” Musk said he’d think about it. But nothing happened.

It didn’t seem to bother him. He even tweeted on November 6, saying “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”

Now this was before Musk bought Twitter.

So the scenario changed after the billionaire took over Twitter. On Wednesday, Jack Sweeney tweeted that the account @ElonJet had been suspended. Shortly afterwards, Jack’s personal account was suspended.

This of course drew a lot of unsavoury comments from Twitter users citing the fact that Elon Musk was only up for free speech provided it was not about him.

It would seem that Elon Musk listened to the cries as @ElonJet has now been reinstated, however with a caveat. Under the new live location rules, @ElonJet can technically post Musk’s jet routes provided the information is no longer live

Here is a Twitter thread stating the new live location rules:

“We’ve updated our Private Information policy to prohibit sharing someone else’s live location in most cases. Here’s what changed and why.”

“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.”

“You can still share your own live location on Twitter. Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.”

Jack Sweeney, via @ElonJet, responded to Musk, saying “How long does delay mean,” later adding: “hour? we need some well-defined rules.”

This has been no official response to this at the time of writing this article. We wait and see..