Facebook user banned for tracking Musk, Zuckerberg's private jets

Jack Sweeney, who tracks the trajectory of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's private jets gets a ban. According to Sweeney, Facebook has banned his tracking account. Sweeney shared on Twitter a screenshot of a notice Facebook sent him. The notice says that Sweeney's page tracking Musk's private jet is not public. This is because it violates Facebook Pages policies. A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Sweeney claims Facebook's email did not reveal more details. It did not say the reason for the ban, a move that caused the bot he used to track Musk's private jet to crash on other sites. "I filed an appeal and never heard back," Sweeney said.

Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, whose pages tracked the private jets of celebrities such as Musk and Zuckerberg have also been restricted in the past. Facebook pages may be removed for posting misleading content, promoting hate speech, or violating the site's community standards. This includes "content that may compromise personal safety."

Sweeney has previously argued that he does not believe the accounts pose a significant security threat. This is because the data is already available through public air traffic tracking sites such as ADS-B Exchange. He also claims that he simply tweets the data through bots scraping the site.

Sweeney still has another account on Instagram

On Facebook, Sweeney does not have any other private jet tracking accounts. But Instagram did not delete the duplicate @elonmusksjet account. By comparison, the Instagram page has only about 11,000 followers. However, the @ElonJet account on Twitter has nearly half a million followers.

Sweeney has said in the past that he was concerned that social media sites might try to ban his account. After he learnt of Musk's plan to buy Twitter, he had to create backup pages on Facebook and Instagram. Sweeney first created the @ElonJet account in June 2020 and made headlines in January after Musk offered to pay him $5,000 to shut down the Twitter account. The billionaire told Sweeney he feared for his safety and didn't like the idea of ​​being shot by a stranger. Sweeney rejected Musk's offer and asked for $50,000, which Musk turned down.

Musk isn't the only one Sweeney has tracked. In May, the college student said he spotted Zuckerberg's new private jet. Previously, the Facebook founder appeared to switch planes shortly after Sweeney first tweeted about his whereabouts. While Sweeney initially rejected Musk's offer, he said he wasn't opposed to removing the tracking account at the right price. Earlier this year, he said he stopped following the plane of billionaire investor Mark Cuban on Twitter in exchange for offering him business advice.