The One Way This Teen Would Stop Tracking Elon’s Jet

Although Sweeney’s tracking accounts use publicly available information and haven’t directly violated the rules of any platform they operate on, things haven’t exactly gone smoothly for them. The student recently reported his account, which tracks Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s jet, had been banned from Facebook, another platform owned by Zuckerberg, without any reason being given. The ban was appealed, and the account was later reinstated, but Facebook has yet to explain to Sweeney why the ban was issued in the first place. The 20-year-old claims he has had similar issues with his Discord channel. The Facebook ban also caused problems with Sweeney’s flight tracking bots and essentially took all of his other profiles down with it until the problem was fixed.

A curious thing to note is Sweeney’s profiles on Instagram, another social media platform owned by Meta, were unaffected by the ban — which suggests it could be a one-off mistake on Facebook’s part and not a conspiracy to protect the platform’s owner. However, a private company can refuse to provide services to an individual for a number of reasons. While certain characteristics, like race, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation have legal protections in place to prevent discrimination, the owner of a social media platform is legally free to ban an individual because that individual is annoying them. So if the Elon Musk Twitter Saga ends with the world’s richest man being forced to follow through with his purchase of the platform, he may get a consolation prize. Despite previously promising to turn the social media giant into a “free speech platform,” Musk could instead use his majority shareholding to silence an account that has been annoying him since 2020.