Meta bans accounts that track celebrity jet travel, including for Zuckerberg
Summary
The suspensions mirror decision Elon Musk made in 2022 to ban similar accounts on Twitter after he acquired the platform.
Meta Platforms took down accounts on Threads and Instagram that track the private jet travel of famous figures including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and others.
The company said the accounts, which use publicly available data to chronicle the planes’ movements, were suspended for privacy reasons, citing “the risk of physical harm to individuals."
The episode echoes a decision Musk made to ban flight-tracking accounts on Twitter after he had acquired the platform, now called X.
Critics say the moves raise questions about the power of giant social-media platforms to favor the privacy of their owners, billionaires or other celebrities over the decisions of users to share publicly-available information.
In 2022, Musk said the jet-tracking accounts posed a threat to people’s safety because they disclosed real-time locations. The platform later allowed an account that tracks the location of private flights linked to Musk with a delay of at least 24 hours.
Meta suspended the accounts on Instagram and Threads this week without warning, said Jack Sweeney, a 22-year-old college student at the University of Central Florida who ran the flight-tracking accounts. He also ran the account that had tracked Musk’s flights on X that Musk banned.
“These platforms operate without transparency, and it feels like they make arbitrary decisions," Sweeney wrote in a note posted on Threads. He also said the suspensions raise questions about whether celebrities are being given special treatment.
Meta said that its decision was in keeping with a recommendation from Meta’s Oversight Board, an outside body that reviews the company’s content policies. The Board had recommended that Meta should not allow the sharing of “private residential information" even if that information was considered publicly available.
Sweeney has made a hobby out of tracking the private jets used by billionaires, Russian oligarchs and other celebrities–sometimes to their frustration.
Taylor Swift’s representatives at one point pushed him to stop tracking her flights, citing concerns about stalking, Sweeney said. Sweeney said Meta previously suspended an account he used for tracking Swift’s flights.
U.S. authorities keep a database of private plane owners and their tail numbers, and publicly available data logs longitude, latitude and altitude figures from the transponders of the crafts. Sweeney created an algorithm that tracks the whereabouts of the jets using the available data.
