Twitter suspends 25 accounts that track government agencies, billionaires’ private planes – Times of India

Twitter on Wednesday suspended over 25 accounts that track the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals – including one that followed the movements of the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, who has said he was committed to “free speech”.
Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast, said he woke up on Wednesday to find that his automated Twitter account, @ElonJet, had been suspended. In recent months, the account amassed more than 5,00,000 followers by using public flight information to post the whereabouts of Musk’s private plane. Twitter later reinstated the @ElonJet account before suspending it again.
Musk had been aware of @ElonJet for months. He said that he would allow the account to remain on the platform. Musk tweeted in November that his commitment to free speech “extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”.
Sweeney’s personal Twitter account was also suspended on Wednesday, along with the other accounts that he runs that track the jets of tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Sweeney shared a message that he had received from Twitter, which said his account had been suspended for violating rules “against platform manipulations and spam”. Sweeney said he was given no specific reason that they had been suspended. “He’s doing the exact opposite of what he said,” he said of Musk, adding that the suspensions felt arbitrary.
Musk and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. But Musk said on Twitter that “real-time posting of someone else’s location violates doxxing policy, but delayed posting of locations are ok”. A review of Twitter’s “private information and media policy” showed that Musk and his team appeared to have created new rules about live locations that were published in the last 24 hours.