Meta bans Musk, Trump and Zuckerberg’s jet-tracking accounts

Meta, formerly Facebook, has banned a number of accounts that monitor the private jets of the world’s rich and powerful, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Non-military flight paths collected by the FAA are considered public record, meaning there’s no difference between checking a grandparent’s flight path and checking Musk’s in the eyes of the law. However, Meta is not the government, and has acted within its right to suppress information.

The accounts were first removed from Threads and Instagram, and will also be removed from Facebook, according to NBC News, citing a Meta spokesperson.

The accounts are mostly run by a college student from Florida named Jack Sweeney. It also tracks the flights of Governor Ron DeSantis, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Sweeney defended his jet tracking to NBC News, saying his work has journalistic value.

“It has journalistic value, it obviously reveals many parts of a CEO’s work or what partnerships can occur,” he told the station. “Now not only that, but it also brings awareness to the very fact that they’re flying and the climate side.”

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told NBC News that the company banned the accounts because of the “risk of physical harm to people.” He said that an independent Meta Oversight Board recommended that references to users’ addresses (aka doxxing) be removed, but an address is not the same as a flight path.

Stone noted this and said Meta was treating the recommendation as “broadly applicable.”

In other words, Facebook can collect your data, but you’re not allowed to collect data about Zuckerberg, according to the site’s broadly interpreted guidelines.

AX, “free speech absolutist” Musk immediately banned Sweeney’s account after the college student began tracking his private flights. Musk justified his apparent hypocrisy by claiming the account violated the site’s doxxing rules, and later threatened to sue Sweeney.

Musk isn’t the only one mulling legal action, as Taylor Swift dropped her lawyers on Sweeney when she learned Sweeney had been tracking her plane. Sweeney told NBC News that Meta eventually deleted the accounts that tracked his plane.

After his brush with Musk at X, Sweeney created new accounts that track the flight patterns of the rich and powerful, but is now waiting a day to share the information, making sure no one can use the data to target to none of the precious politicians and billionaires it maintains. eyelashes

He doesn’t plan to do the same for Meta. He fired the company, saying they “are not being transparent.”