You can track Elon Musk’s private jet on Twitter again—albeit with a 24-hour delay.
After @ElonJet, run by 20-year-old college student Jack Sweeney, was banned earlier this month when Musk came after accounts that revealed his live location, Sweeney was forced to document the billionaire’s private flights on other social media accounts instead.
In recent days, however, Sweeney launched @ElonJetNextDay, which posts the flights with a 24-hour delay, in a bid to circumvent Twitter’s nascent ban on posting real-time location information.
@ElonJetNextDay, which launched on Dec. 22 and currently has 18.2K followers, is showing about five flights made by Musk’s plane as of Dec. 27. The flights include one from Oakland, California, that landed in Sacramento after a flyby of Las Vegas.
The account publishes publicly available information that most commercial and private aircraft are required to broadcast in order to prevent midair collisions. Flight-tracking websites such as FlightRadar24 publish the same information.
Despite tweeting in November that he wouldn’t ban @ElonJet because of his “commitment to free speech,” Musk banned the account on Dec. 14. He added that he would pursue legal action against Sweeney for “facilitating harm” to his family after he alleged that a “crazy stalker” followed a car carrying his 2-year-old son in Los Angeles. (The police have said there's no link between the flight data and the incident involving his son, The Washington Post reports.)
The ban came as Musk banned any account that displayed “real-time location info." The Twitter CEO added that “posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.” It’s this rule that Sweeney clearly hopes will help @ElonJetNextDay stay online.
However, Twitter users including Sweeney have reported that the account is shadowbanned. According to one user, the platform has marked @ElonJetNextDay as sensitive content, which hides it from search results. Mashable reporter Matt Binder additionally said that Twitter is preventing users from sharing links to @ElonJet on other platforms.
According to Binder, posting such links brings up the message: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”