Update: Several hours after this story was published, Twitter appeared to briefly unban @elonjet. The account was live for roughly an hour on Wednesday night before it was suspended again, with Elon Musk suggesting he was preparing to take legal action against its owner.
Jack Sweeney, a college student who developed a hobby tracking Elon Musk’s private jet, rolled out of bed after 9 a.m. on Wednesday to find that the billionaire had banned his Twitter account.
The 20-year-old, currently on winter break from the University of Central Florida, had emerged over the past year as Musk’s social media arch-nemesis, racking up more than 500,000 followers curious about the Tesla titan’s travel habits.
Just last month, shortly after completing his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, Musk had applauded himself for allowing the @elonjet account to remain up, arguing that it demonstrated his commitment to free speech, even though he considered the jet tracker a “direct personal safety risk.”
“It’s pretty crazy, because he literally put out the whole tweet saying that he wouldn’t [ban the profile],” Sweeney told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “So this morning, I am pretty surprised.” Later on Wednesday, Twitter also suspended Sweeney’s personal account.
The automated account is no longer available on the platform, just days after Sweeney said it had been shadow banned. Over the weekend, he shared a Twitter thread in which he said a Twitter employee told him that on Dec. 2 that the account had its “visibility limited/restricted to a severe degree internally.”
The thread also included a screenshot purporting to show Ella Irwin—the person who replaced Yoel Roth as Twitter’s head of trust and safety—sending a Slack message to an unspecified “team” asking them to “apply heavy VF [visibility filtering] to @elonjet immediately.” It’s not clear when the message was sent.
“Visibility filtering” is the term used by Twitter staff to refer to shadow banning, Bari Weiss reported in a Twitter thread last week. The former New York Times columnist said an unnamed employee at the company told her it was used as a tool “to suppress what people see to different levels.” Weiss added that visibility filtering was used to “block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the ‘trending’ page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches,” without users’ knowledge.
On Monday, Sweeney followed up on his own thread to say that it appeared the shadow ban had ended. “I think Twitter noticed my tweets and back tracked. Guilty in my book,” Sweeney tweeted on Tuesday.
As of early Wednesday, the jet account’s tweets were inaccessible with a message simply stating: “Account suspended.”
Sweeney is skeptical of Twitter’s claim that the account violated its rules, he told The Daily Beast. “If that was true, then it would have been suspended a month ago,” he said. “They can bend the rules how they want to bend the rules for certain people.”
He added that the ban invalidates Musk’s claim that he wants Twitter to be a “town square” where all types of speech are accepted.
“[In] a town square, there’s, like, police, but you’re allowed to protest,” he said. “But here… he’s literally just disabled the account.”
Protocol reported in February that Musk personally contacted Sweeney in November 2021 to offer $5,000 to shut down the jet-tracking account. Sweeney—who was 19 years old at the time—said he responded by asking Musk to up his offer to $50,000 before saying he would also consider scrapping the account for an internship.
Musk then blocked Sweeney some time after Jan. 23 this year, it’s claimed.
Sweeney has also set up dozens of other accounts including @CelebJets, which sparked international headlines in July when it posted details of a 17-minute flight flown by Kylie Jenner’s plane between two cities in California.
In an interview with Fortune, Sweeney explained he was motivated to run the accounts by celebrities’ hypocrisy who emphasize the importance of tackling climate change while also globe-trotting on their gas-guzzling private jets. “They say one thing and then do another,” Sweeney said. “They are just showing off but yeah, they shouldn’t be when it is wasteful, and it’s just like ‘look at me.’”
It’s not yet clear why the @elonjet account has been suspended or if the suspension is permanent. The Daily Beast has contacted Twitter for comment.
As for Sweeney, he said he planned to bring the tracker to his own website anyway, where he’ll have the opportunity to generate more revenue. Prior to the ban, he had already made more than the $5,000 Musk first offered him.
But the money isn’t the point, he said. “It’s more like the people you’ve met. Just stuff you’ve learned” along the way.
