Enlarge image
Elon Musk's private jet (here's a photo from 2020): The tech billionaire doesn't like the fact that his travels can be tracked using flight data
Photo:
HANNIBAL HANSCHKE / REUTERS
"Anything to do with me is forbidden," Jack Sweeney tweeted last week.
"So much for free speech." What irked the 20-year-old US student was a ban on his most well-known account on the platform, @ElonJet.
It was a flight data bot that automatically tracked and published the take-offs and landings of Elon Musk's private jet based on publicly available data.
The tech billionaire had been annoyed about the account for a long time and described it as a risk to his personal safety, and in the meantime he had even offered Sweeney $5,000 to switch it off.
As the new Twitter boss, Musk made short work of it: @ElonJet was banned under a new policy that prohibits not only posting but also sharing links to "live location information."
What came across as a Lex ElonJet soon even led to bans on several US journalists who had reported on the dispute with Sweeney (read more about this here).
It's been a week since the uproar and Jack Sweeney seems to have felt the moment is right for his ministry to come back.
In any case, on Thursday there was the first sign of life from a new account called @ElonJetNextDay, which Sweeney also officially declares as his on his website.
Meanwhile, his personal Twitter account @JxckSweeney remains suspended from the platform, as does @ElonJet.
Elsewhere, the service continues to post without delay
@ElonJetNexDay basically publishes the same information as the original service, which is still available on Facebook and Mastodon, for example.
From now on, however, the data should only appear on Twitter with an artificial delay of 24 hours, which also explains the "NextDay" in the name of the account.
Jack Sweeney is relying on this restriction because it gives the account a chance to survive on Twitter: The company's new policy states that the ban applies to "live location information".
On the other hand, "the disclosure of publicly available location information is permitted after a reasonable period of time so that the person is no longer at risk of being physically injured".
Elon Musk himself had said about the new regulation that a slightly delayed publication of places to which someone had traveled did not pose a security problem and was therefore "okay".
However, Musk and Sweeney should still not be on good terms with each other.
Elon Musk threatened to take legal action against the University of Central Florida student on Twitter last week, although he gave no details.
Jack Sweeney, on the other hand, doesn't seem interested in artificially slowing down @ElonJet everywhere.
On his website, Sweeney not only lists parallel accounts on Mastodon and Facebook, but also on Instagram, Telegram, and Truth Social.
Unlike the Twitter account, these accounts do not wait until the following day to provide their information.
mbo