Meta has suspended a number of accounts on its social media platforms Instagram and Threads that share updates on movements of private jets owned by moguls and celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner. Jack Sweeney, the Florida college student who coded many of the jet-tracking bots using publicly available data, revealed Monday that many, but not all, of his accounts had been disabled. The ones that were not suspended included trackers on the flights of politicians, such as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, which Sweeney said in a Threads post was “quite strange.” A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that the suspended accounts violated its privacy policy. “Given the risk of physical harm to individuals, and in keeping with the independent Oversight Board’s recommendation, we’ve disabled these accounts for violating our privacy policy,” the spokesperson said. Sweeney’s jet trackers on X were banned in December 2022 after he butted heads with Musk, the platform’s owner. Taylor Swift also sent Sweeney a cease and desist letter in 2023 for tracking her flights during the Eras tour after she got a flood of bad press over the huge carbon footprint of her frequent private air travel.
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