Elon Musk’s confusing rationale for suspending @ElonJet
Elon Musk has plenty of online foes, but no one seems to annoy him quite like Jack Sweeney.
Sweeney, a 20-year-old student at the University of Central Florida, set up an account called @ElonJet in June 2020 that would tweet the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet, a Gulfstream G650ER, based on publicly available transponder data.
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Twitter suspended @ElonJet, and later Sweeney’s personal account, on Wednesday, Dec. 14. A few hours and an uproar later, Musk explained himself.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info,” Musk tweeted. He clarified that posting delayed location data, however, is okay and wouldn’t violate the new policy.
It was a surprising turnaround. Just one month ago, Musk tweeted that he would not ban the @ElonJet account: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”
Now, Musk says he plans to sue Sweeney for endangering his family.
The new policy seems to violate Musk’s own broadly-defined understanding of free speech, which since the billionaire owner took over the company two months ago, has allowed the spread of both covid misinformation and racial slurs.
Twitter’s confusing new location data policy
Here’s how an official Twitter account explained the new rule:
“When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm,” the account wrote. “Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended.”
Tweets that share “historical” location data, which the account specified to mean “not [from the] same day,” will not violate the policy. The account added that tweets showing “public engagement,” such as a concert or political events, will also not violate the policy.
A policy that protects average users from real-world threats when their location is shared would be reasonable, but Twitter’s new policy is too vague to make this happen. There are often real-world threats to tweeting a person’s live location, but there are also plenty of examples where it’s no threat at all. With a decimated content moderation team, it’s unlikely Twitter has the ability to distinguish between the two and effectively enforce the new policy.
It seems more likely that Twitter will selectively reserve the policy for when—inevitably—another user starts tweeting out the location of Musk’s private plane.
Here are a few scenarios that may or may not violate the new policy:
A congressional reporter tweets a photo of Senator Chuck Schumer walking on the street toward the Capitol building
A fan tweets that Taylor Swift is walking around a specific neighborhood in New York
A user tweets a photo of a cop a few hours after a wrongful arrest
A protester tweets a photo showing a group of people marching in real-time
A tourist tweets a photo of a friend at the Eiffel Tower
