The college student whose Twitter account monitored the course of Elon Musk’s private jet has moved his tracking project to Meta’s newly launched Threads.
On Thursday, Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student and aviation enthusiast, launched his first post on Threads under the handle @elonmusksjet after Twitter suspended his tracking operation last December.
“ElonJet has arrived to Threads!” Sweeney wrote in the post which has since garnered over 7,700 likes and over 200 replies on Twitter’s newest rival.
In a following post, Sweeney addressed Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, writing: “@zuck will I be allowed to stay.” The tongue-in-cheek post appears to be a subtle jab at Twitter boss Elon Musk, who suspended Sweeney’s jet-tracking account last year after imposing new conditions on all of Twitter’s users that the sharing of anyone’s current location was prohibited.
Prior to getting suspended from Twitter, Sweeney ran “bot” accounts that used flight information from public domains to track the flight paths of Elon Musk as well as other celebrities’ airplanes including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, Sweeney also started tracking the flight paths of various Russian oligarchs.
Musk’s decision to suspend Sweeney’s account last year came shortly after he promised not to, saying last November: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”
Musk later said: “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.” He vowed legal action against Sweeney, who he said “supported harm to my family”.
Since Meta launched Threads, the new social media platform saw 70 million users in less than 48 hours. In response, Twitter has threatened to sue Meta, with Musk accusing Zuckerberg of violating “intellectual property rights”.
