David Bridges
Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old known for tracking Elon Musk’s jet, said on Thursday that Facebook had shut down his page.
Sweeney shared a picture of a notice from the social media company on Twitter that said Sweeney’s page for tracking Musk’s jets had been “unpublished because it violates Facebook Pages terms.”
“Really @Facebook,” Sweeney tweeted.
A spokesperson for Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication.
Sweeney told Insider the Facebook email did not share additional detail as to why the account had been banned and the shutdown temporarily caused the bot he uses to track Musk’s planes to crash on other sites as well.
“I did an appeal, but haven’t heard back,” Sweeney said.
The University of Central Florida student has had his jet-tracking pages reported or restricted on social media in the past. Facebook pages can be taken down for posting misleading content, promoting hate speech, or violating the site’s Community Standards which includes content that could “content that could contribute to a risk of harm to the physical security of persons.”
Sweeney previously told Insider he doesn’t think the accounts pose a major security issue as the data is already available online via public air-traffic-tracking sites like the ADS-B Exchange. He said he merely puts the data on Twitter via bots that scrape the websites.
The college student does not have any other jet-tracking accounts on Facebook. But, Instagram which is also owned by Facebook parent company Meta has not taken down the duplicate @elonmusksjet account. Though, the Instagram page only has about 11,000 followers as compared to the nearly 500,000 accounts that follow @ElonJet on Twitter.
Sweeney has expressed concern in the past that social media sites might try to ban his accounts, especially when he first learned Musk planned to buy Twitter. At the time, he said he created backup pages on Facebook and Instagram.
The college student first started @ElonJet in June 2020, but he first made headlines in January after saying Musk offered to pay him $5,000 to shut down the Twitter account that tracked his whereabouts. The billionaire told Sweeney he was concerned for his safety and didn’t “love the idea of being shot by a nutcase.” Sweeney previously told Insiderthat he countered Musk’s offer, asking for $50,000 instead, but Musk declined.
The Tesla CEO isn’t the only person Sweeney tracks. In May, the college student said he’d re-discovered Mark Zuckerberg’s aircraft after the Facebook founder appeared to switch jets shortly after Sweeney first started sharing his whereabouts on Twitter.
While Sweeney initially turned down Musk’s $5,000 offer to take down his account, the 20-year-old has said he isn’t against deleting the tracking accounts for the right price. Earlier this year, he told Insider he stopped tracking Mark Cuban’s jets on Twitter after the billionaire investor reached out and offered him business advice in exchange.
