What do you do when you’re a billionaire social media mogul worried about people sharing the publicly available location of your private jet? You simply ban them from your platform. Meta suspended accounts tracking the jets of co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and other celebrities from Instagram and Threads on Monday. However, the ban likely won’t stop anyone from finding the aircraft carrying the rich and famous.
There were various uses for flight-tracking accounts, such as criticizing the climate impact of the wealthy when they take surprisingly short trips by private jet. However, social media companies claim that it jeopardizes personal safety. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch, “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.”
Flight-tracking accounts reached prominence with @ElonJet on Twitter and Musk’s attempts to shutter the account before he owned the platform. The Tesla CEO even offered $5,000 to college student Jack Sweeney to deactivate the account. Sweeney continued to operate several accounts following celebrities’ flight activities. He was forced to shut down the account tailing Taylor Swift after the famous musician threatened to sue him. Regarding the Meta ban, Sweeney posted on his personal Threads account, “Today feels like December 15 2022,” the date Musk permanently suspended @ElonJet.
Many believed that the celebrity flight-tracking era would end in May after President Joe Biden signed a bill into law allowing private plane owners to anonymize their registration information with the FAA. However, this just added an extra hurdle. Every aircraft is still tracked and tied to a unique registration number. The only missing link is knowing if the person sought is on the plane, which can be easily confirmed by other means.
