(Reuters) – Social media platform Twitter Inc suspended a bot account tracking its owner Elon Musk’s private jet, the account’s operator Jack Sweeney said on Wednesday.
The account tracked movements of Musk’s private jet using data in the public domain and puts out alerts.
Musk said in a tweet in November that his commitment to free speech “extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”.
Sweeney, a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student, tweeted On Saturday that Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, requested the account be filtered and less visible to users.
Twitter and Sweeney did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
In media interviews, Sweeney has said that he turned down a $5,000 offer from the Tesla Inc chief executive officer in 2021 to shut down his bot account.
Sweeney also operates similar bot accounts tracking Musk’s jet on other platforms – Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook and Instagram and Telegram.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
