Elon Musk accused of banning account that was tracking his movements

Twitter owner Elon Musk has preached about free speech and granting amnesty to previously banned accounts. But now Musk is being accused of bending those rules for his own sake after a Twitter account that tracks Musk was banned.

For the last two years, the account ElonJet has been tracking Elon Musk's private jet movement.

On Saturday, creator Jack Sweeney, who is also behind CelebJets, tweeted that he believed Twitter, under Musk's direction, shadow-banned his account.

"Internal messages obtained by [an] anonymous Twitter employee explained to me that on “Dec 2 2022 your account elonjet was visibility limited/restricted to a severe degree internally," Sweeney wrote.

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Sweeney claimed this included "heavy visibility filtering" which reduced his tweets on Twitter's home page.

But shortly after checking his account status and finding it was not shadow-banned, his account was outright banned entirely.

Twitter did not clarify which rule elonjet violated but indicated the account had broken a policy.

According to Twitter's privacy rules, "You may not publish or post other people's private information without their express authorization and permission."

Twitter stresses that its "primary aim is to protect individuals from potential physical harm as a result of their information being shared, so we consider information such as physical location."

However, other jet-tracking accounts like CelebJets and RUOligarchJets, which tracks Russian oligarch's jets, were not banned.

Without any explanation from Musk or Sweeny as to why elonjet was banned, many accused Musk of banning Sweeney's jet-tracking account unfairly.

@WestPointGirl90

Some people pointed out that the information Sweeney was using to track Musk's jet was public information, therefore should not be considered a breach of privacy.

@chillxnye

@BigDamnHerosSir

Musk did not comment on the ban publicly at the time of this article.

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