Meta — previously Facebook — has banned a number of accounts that keep tabs on private jets belonging to the world's rich and powerful, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump.
Non-military flight paths collected by the FAA are considered public record, meaning there is no difference between checking on a grandparent's flight path and checking on Musk's in the eyes of the law. However, Meta is not the government, and has acted on its right to stomp out the information.
The accounts were first deleted from Threads and Instagram, and will also be removed from Facebook, according to NBC News, citing a Meta spokesman.
The accounts are mostly run by a Florida college student named Jack Sweeney. He also tracks the flights of Governor Ron DeSantis, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.
Sweeney defended his jet tracking to NBC News, saying that there is journalistic value to his work.
“It has journalistic value, reveals obviously many parts of a CEOs work or what partnerships may occur,” he told the broadcaster. “Now not only that, but also it brings awareness to the very fact they are flying and the climate side.”
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, told NBC News that the company banned the accounts due to the "risk of physical harm to individuals." He said an independent Oversight Board at Meta recommended that references to users addresses — aka doxxing — be removed, but an address is not the same as a flight path.
Stone noted this and said that Meta was treating the recommendation as "broadly applicable."
In other words, Facebook can collect your data, but you are not allowed to collect data on Zuckerberg, per the site's broadly interpreted guidelines.
Over on X, “free speech absolutist” Musk immediately banned Sweeney's account after the college student started tracking his private flights. Musk justified his apparent hypocrisy by claiming the account broke the site's doxxing rules, and he later threatened to sue Sweeney.
Musk is not alone in pondering legal action, as Taylor Swift loosed her lawyers on Sweeney when she learned Sweeney had been tracking her jet. Sweeney told NBC News that Meta ultimately deleted the accounts that were tracking her jet.
After his brush with Musk on X, Sweeney made new accounts that track the rich and powerful's flight patterns, but now he waits a day to share the info, ensuring no one can use the data to target any of the precious politicians and billionaires he keeps tabs on.
He does not plan to do the same for Meta. He dismissed the company, saying they "aren't being transparent."
