A tweet from the account’s operator, Jack Sweeney, stated that the microblogging website run by Elon Musk has suspended a bot account that was tracking Musk’s private jet.
Using public-domain data, the Twitter account tracked Musk’s private jet’s movements.
Sweeney’s Twitter account was also suspended later that day.
“Extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk wrote in a tweet in November.
Sweeney, a 20-year-old student at the University of Central Florida, tweeted on Saturday that Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, requested that the account be filtered and less visible to users. Sweeney also runs similar bot accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram that track Musk’s jet.
Both Sweeney and Twitter did not immediately respond to Reuters’s inquiries for clarification.
Sweeney stated in previous interviews with the media that Musk offered him $5,000 in 2021 to shut down the bot account.
Separately, Twitter accounts that were following the airplanes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, three tech billionaires, have been suspended.
