Elon Musk to sue creator of Twitter bot

Twitter has blocked the account of the @ElonJet bot, an algorithm that tracked the flights of Elon Musk’s private jet in real time. The billionaire himself is threatening legal action against the bot’s creator, a 20-year-old student at the University of Central Florida, Jack Sweeney, whose profile was also banned.

The shadow ban of Sweeney is described in the Twitter files published by Musk. Many social network users drew attention to the fact that when searching for Sweeney’s account, Twitter does not offer it as one of the nicknames.

The young enthusiast created @ElonJet back in 2020. The student considered himself a superfan of Musk and wanted to understand what principles the entrepreneur uses to run his multibillion-dollar business. Interestingly, Musk offered the student $ 5,000 to remove the tracker bot because he was worried about his personal safety. Sweeney rejected the offer, but instead asked for $ 50,000 and a Tesla. Ultimately, he and Musk never reached an agreement.

In November of this year, when Musk became the official owner of Twitter, he stated that his commitment to freedom of speech «extends even to not banning an account for tracking an airplane, even if it is a direct risk to personal safety.» So Twitter briefly restored the bot before banning it again. The platform explained its actions by saying that «providing real-time information about the location of (Musk — ed.) is a violation of company policy.»

My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022

Interestingly, posts from @ElonJet are also published on Instagram and Facebook. The bot’s activity on social media over the past few days has not shown any suspicious activity — the last posts on the account were about Musk’s 48-minute flight to Los Angeles.

After @ElonJet was blocked, accounts tracking flights of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, John Kerry, and Russian oligarchs were banned.

Musk’s activities as CEO of Twitter are raising more and more questions about censorship and freedom of speech. Recently, the social network blocked traffic from 30 mobile operators around the world. Ukrainian companies were among the operators whose users were banned from registering on Twitter. Musk also said that the platform will remove all outdated blue tickers, as users received them in a «corrupted» way — now they can only be purchased as part of the Twitter Blue premium subscription.