Original author(s) | Jack Sweeney |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Ground Control [1] (GRNDCTRL LLC [1] [2] [3] ) |
Repository | |
Website | grndcntrl |
ElonJet is a service that uses social media accounts to track the real-time private airplane usage of Elon Musk. [4] [5] [6] The service, created and provided by Jack Sweeney using public data, has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Truth Social, Mastodon, Threads, and formerly on Twitter, where the Twitter account once had about 530,000 followers, before being suspended. [7] [8] [9] Several of the social media accounts use the handle @elonjet. [10]
The Twitter account, created in June 2020, had been targeted by Musk beginning in 2021. He offered to pay Sweeney $5,000; Sweeney countered requesting $50,000 or an internship in one of Musk's companies, and offered advice on restricting flight tracking data. Musk blocked Sweeney in January 2021[ dubious ]. In late 2022, after Musk purchased Twitter, he announced he would not ban the ElonJet account. [11] In December, a stalker followed Elon's 2-year-old son while he was traveling in a car; the stalker thought Musk was in the car. [12] After the incident, the account was restricted and then blocked along with Sweeney's personal and other flight tracking accounts, as part of the December 2022 Twitter account suspensions. [13] Later, shortly after the incident, accounts of several journalists were reinstated. [14]
On December 22, 2022, Sweeney started the new @ElonJetNextDay Twitter account, which continues to track the flights of Elon Musk's private jets, but publishes flight location information on a 24-hour delay in compliance with Twitter's new rules that "sharing publicly available location information after a reasonable time has elapsed, so that the individual is no longer at risk for physical harm" is not a violation. [15]
The ElonJet service uses publicly available flight data as well as an automated computer program, a Twitter bot, to report Elon Musk's flights. [16] The service uses ADS-B data, publicly available records, to give general information about where and when Musk's private jet was taking off and landing, though it cannot indicate who is on board or where the passengers travel before or after the flight. The Twitter account in particular became a reliable way for Musk's investors, fans, and critics to determine his whereabouts, often between the Austin area where he lives, the San Francisco Bay area where Tesla's factory is, and Southern California, where SpaceX is headquartered. [8]
As of July 2023 [update] , the ElonJet service is hosted on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. [17] [18] The Mastodon account was created on December 14, 2022, a day after the original Twitter account was suspended. [8] [19] Sweeney has earned a few thousand dollars with the accounts, via ad revenue, allowing him to upgrade his computer. [20] A subreddit dedicated to the service, r/ElonJetTracker, gained over 40,000 members in the two days since it was created on December 14, becoming one of the fastest-growing subreddits on the website. [9]
The ElonJet Twitter account was started in June 2020 by Florida student Jack Sweeney. [21] At the time, he was a high school senior, with his education suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. [20] Sweeney considered himself a fan of Musk's work at SpaceX and Tesla, leading him to start the account. [21]
Elon Musk has had issues with the account for a long time, and offered Jack Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account in 2021. Sweeney countered asking for $50,000, saying he would use the money for college and possibly to buy a Tesla Model 3. Their last exchange was in January 2022, when Musk said it wouldn't feel right to pay in order to shut the account down. [7] Sweeney asked about the possibility of an internship at one of Musk's companies, and offered Musk advice, including about a federal privacy program to vary the ID his transponder beamed out, thus blocking flight tracking programs. Musk began using the program, though Sweeney remained able to track Musk's flights. [22] [20] Musk blocked Sweeney sometime after January 23. [23]
Elon Musk @elonmusk My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
November 6, 2022 [24]
Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022, and announced early in the next month that he would not ban the ElonJet account, as he is an advocate for free speech, despite a "direct personal safety risk". On December 10, Sweeney shared his discovery that the Twitter account had been shadow banned, where Twitter intentionally limits the account's reach within the site. Twitter's Trust and Safety Council vice president asked to place "heavy visibility filtering" on the account. The council was disbanded on December 12, and that day Sweeney reported that the account no longer seemed hidden in any way. [21]
On the morning of December 14, the social media site suspended the ElonJet account. Later that day, it was briefly reinstated and accessible, along with new rules having been released by Twitter that outlined limitations on sharing real-time location information due to concerns about physical safety, [25] indicating that slightly delayed information would be acceptable under the new policy. According to the Washington Post, Sweeney then asked Musk how long of a data feed delay was required to comply with new rules, but the ElonJet account was re-suspended by the evening of the same day. Sweeney's personal Twitter account was also blocked, along with all of his other accounts that tracked private flights of public figures and Russian oligarchs. [7] [26] [8] On December 15, the Twitter account of rival social network Mastodon was also blocked, for tweeting about the situation. According to The Verge, "it appears Twitter counts a link to @ElonJet's Mastodon account as a violation" of their newest policy against linking to third-party URLs that provide real-time travel information. [27] The accounts of multiple journalists who frequently cover the technology industry were also banned for reporting on the issue. [28]
On December 14, 2022, Musk announced he would be taking legal action against Sweeney. [7] On the same evening, Musk alleged in a tweet that a "crazy stalker" had followed a car carrying his 2-year-old son. The incident is claimed to have occurred in Los Angeles, in which the accused individual "blocked [the] car from moving" and "climbed onto [the] hood" according to Musk. While Sweeney has posted publicly available information about Musk's private jets, flights, and airports used, Sweeney has not shared information about Musk's family members or Musk's cars. [8] A Los Angeles Police detective in the stalking investigations unit said the unit had no evidence indicating the alleged stalker had used ElonJet. [29] Regarding the incident, South Pasadena police said they were investigating a report of "an assault with a deadly weapon involving a vehicle", and labelled a member of Musk's security team as a "suspect". The statement also mentioned that "At no time during the incident did the victim identify the suspect or indicate the altercation was anything more than coincidental". [30]
Vice News reported the moves were part of Musk's "most confusing and publicly volatile series of events yet", considering it disturbing to ban accounts that he promised would remain active, creating rules to justify the ban, and threatening legal action against a 20-year-old. [26]
Sweeney stated that despite the legal threats, he does not plan to stop monitoring Musk's airplane travel and will continue publishing the flight-tracking information by using other social media platforms, including on his new Mastodon account. [31] One day later, on December 15, Twitter suspended the accounts of nine journalists of national news organizations without warning, as part of what was referred to as the "Thursday Night Massacre", [32] [33] [34] after they had posted links to the ElonJet account or similar jet trackers. [35] Musk claimed reporters had doxxed him and his family, and alleged that, by covering the ElonJet story, they were linking to real-time flight information, which is "basically assassination coordinates" according to Musk. [10]
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$232 billion as of December 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $182.6 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.
Vox populi is a Latin phrase that literally means "voice of the people". It is used in English in the meaning "the opinion of the majority of the people". In journalism, vox pop or man on the street refers to short interviews with members of the public.
Steven L. Herman is a journalist and author, and, as of June 2022, Voice of America's chief national correspondent. From 2017 through 2021, Herman was senior White House correspondent and subsequently VOA's White House bureau chief.
X, formerly and colloquially known as Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks. Users can share and post text messages, images, and videos known historically as "tweets". X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature. Although the service is now called X, the primary domain name 'twitter.com' remains in place as of February 2024, with the 'x.com' URL redirecting to that address.
CongressEdits (@congressedits) is a social media bot account created on July 8, 2014 that posts changes to Wikipedia articles that originate from IP addresses within the ranges assigned to the United States Congress. The changes could be made by anyone using a computer on the U.S. Capitol complex's computer network, including both staff of U.S. elected representatives and senators as well as visitors such as journalists, constituents, tourists, and lobbyists. CongressEdits has been called a watchdog by NBC News.
Mastodon is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
X, formerly and colloquially known as Twitter, may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, from their social networking service. Suspensions of high-profile accounts often attract media attention, and Twitter's use of suspensions has been controversial.
Deplatforming, also known as no-platforming, has been defined as an "attempt to boycott a group or individual through removing the platforms used to share information or ideas", or "the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website."
Taylor Lorenz is an American journalist. She is a columnist for The Washington Post. She was previously a technology reporter for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider, and social media editor for the Daily Mail. She is particularly known for covering Internet culture.
Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp, and has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from politics to science.
Donie O'Sullivan is an Irish journalist working for CNN in New York.
Truth Social is an alt-tech social media platform created by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), an American media and technology company founded in October 2021 by former US president Donald Trump. It has been called a "Twitter clone" that competes with Parler, Gab, and Mastodon in trying to provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend.
Jack Sweeney is an American programmer and entrepreneur. In 2022, he became known for creating Twitter bots to track the private jets of Russian oligarchs and other prominent individuals, including Elon Musk through the ElonJet account, and Taylor Swift.
Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech.
The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.
On December 15, 2022, Twitter suspended the accounts of ten journalists who have covered the company and its owner, Elon Musk. They included reporters Keith Olbermann, Steven L. Herman, and Donie O'Sullivan, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. The suspensions came after an incident that occurred on December 14, when Musk's 2-year-old son was followed by a stalker while he was traveling in a car, the stalker thought Musk was in the car. Musk said the accounts had violated a policy on doxxing. Posters on behalf of the owners of the accounts were quick to claim that the suspensions were permanent before Musk clarified account access would be restricted for seven days. Some of the accounts were restored earlier.
Linette Lopez is an American journalist who focuses on U.S. politics and economics, and writes columns for Business Insider. As a senior finance editor, she has investigated companies involved with public-facing controversies, and is most widely known for her coverage of Tesla, Inc. A regular contributor to Marketplace produced by American Public Media, Lopez teaches as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has also been a frequent commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. Twitter was then rebranded to X in July 2023. Initially during Musk's tenure, Twitter introduced a series of reforms and management changes; the company reinstated a number of previously banned accounts, reduced the workforce by approximately 80%, closed one of Twitter's three data centers, and largely eliminated the content moderation team, replacing it with the crowd-sourced fact-checking system Community Notes.
Spoutible is a social media and social networking service created by Christopher Bouzy, the founder of the Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel. It launched in February 2023.
Junlper is an American former shitposter on Twitter. She is known for posting satirical screenshots of fabricated news stories and is credited with popularizing the term 'goblin mode' and creating a viral fake headline about the "dick vein" being removed from Snickers candy bars.
I got suspended from Twitter yesterday. I'm one of at least eight journalists who were casualties of Elon Musk's 'Thursday Night Massacre,' after the billionaire went on a power-hungry suspension spree.
Critics say the 'Thursday Night Massacre' is more evidence of the 'free speech absolutist' billionaire eliminating speech and users he personally dislikes
The episode, which one well known security researcher labeled the 'Thursday Night Massacre,' is being regarded by critics as fresh evidence of Musk, who considers himself a 'free speech absolutist,' eliminating speech and users he personally dislikes.