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On Monday, Meta banned dozens of accounts that report publicly available information tracking the jets of celebrities on Instagram and Threads. It banned a total of 38 accounts run by Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student, who used them to track the private jets of people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Russian oligarchs.
Sweeney told Gizmodo that the accounts were deactivated with “no warning. No reason.”
“Today feels like December 15th 2022,” Sweeney said in a post on Threads. Sweeney gained notoriety at the end of 2022 when Elon Musk publicly quarreled with the account and blamed it for putting his life in danger. After Musk purchased Twitter, he immediately banned the account.
Sweeney flourished on other social media sites though, including Instagram and Threads. The movements of these jets are publicly available information. Sweeney is pulling their location from sites such as ADS-B Exchange. It’s the law in the U.S. that this information be publicly available. You can even watch the movements of Air Force One on several websites.
“It’s wild how tracking public info can be so controversial, my flight tracking account on Instagram and Threads hasn’t violated rules for years,” Sweeney tells Gizmodo. “The only account that was suspended before yesterday was the Taylor Swift jet tracking account when [the] Swift team requested Meta remove the account last December/ January.”
Meta did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment but told TechCrunch that its Oversight Board decided to ban the accounts because they constituted a threat of physical harm to the tracked celebs. “Given the risk of physical harm to individuals, and in keeping with the independent Oversight Board’s recommendation, we’ve disabled these accounts for violating our privacy policy,” Meta told Techcrunch in an email.
Sweeney has been through all of this before. He’s posting on X again after agreeing to delay publication of the movements of Musk’s jet. “X even allows me to post with a delay,” he said. “If [Meta] gave me a warning I would’ve delayed it…I don’t know solidly who or what the motivator here was for Meta. Suddenly they care for some reason?”
According to a statement Sweeney made on Threads, Meta’s original wave of bannings didn’t include his accounts that tracked Trump and DeSantis’ jets. But after Fortune reported on the situation and pointed out they’d been left off the list, Meta went ahead and banned those accounts too.
Sweeney tells Gizmodo he can’t log into the accounts to see why they were suspended. “It’s completely wiped like you can’t do anything but sign in. When you do it’s just black. You can’t even access settings. Which is different from what I’ve seen before,” he says.
He also says he can’t log into the website for Meta’s Oversight Board to appeal the ban. Meta users are, typically, allowed to appeal these kinds of decisions through the Oversight Board’s website. “If it went through the Oversight Board already like Meta’s comment says then why isn’t the public on the Oversight Board’s website?”
