The teenager behind the Twitter page tracking Elon Musk's private jet has claimed that his account has been "shadowbanned" on the platform.
Jack Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, set up an account - that goes by the handle @elonjet - that tracks the 51-year-old billionaire's private jet as it relocates to different airports.
The programmer's page boasted 527.3K followers, with even Musk himself tweeting after his $44bn takeover of the site that he will not ban the account despite it being a "direct personal safety risk" because of his "commitment to free speech".
However, Sweeney claimed in a Twitter thread on December 11 that the Tesla owner had taken action against his automated account, and shadowbanned him.
Read Sweeney's thread below:Shadowbanning means a profile and its posts will become less visible without making the user aware of the filtering. Several users have pointed out that they were unable to tag or search their page of late, according to Insider.
Sweeney wrote that an anonymous Twitter staffer told him that the plane-tracking account was "visibility limited/restricted to a severe degree internally" on December 2.
He also shared what appeared to be a message sent internally at Twitter from the head of Trust and Safety, Ella Irwin, including a request that the account is subject to "heavy VF" - meaning visibility filtering.
Speaking to Insider, Sweeney stated that he had thought "for quite a while" that the account had been "search banned/ search suggestion banned" before the staffer reached out.
He also told The New York Post that he believes the SpaceX founder told Irwin to do that, saying: "Elon might have told Ella Irwin to do that. I don’t know what the cause was. It most likely was him, I would assume."
However, on December 12, Sweeney ran the jet-tracking account through a "shadowbanning" test website, which discovered that the page was now active.
"It appears @ElonJet is [no] longer banned or hidden in any way," he tweeted. "I think Twitter noticed my tweets and backtracked. Guilty in my book."
Sweeney has verbally argued with Musk since launching the account in June 2020. The teen created a bot that uses publicly available flight data to follow the business mogul's private jet.
While the new Twitter owner said that there were no plans to suspend Sweeney's account, he once offered him $5,000 to delee it, and said at the time: "I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase," per Protocol.
Sweeney made a counteroffer of $50,000, and Musk said he would consider the offer, however, the businessman then stopped responding to the teen's messages.
Furthermore, the programmer revealed that through his tracking site, he saw that Musk hasn't much time at SpaceX headquarters. Instead, he appears to be distracted by the social media site.
"He’s putting a lot of time into Twitter right now," Sweeney told The New York Post. "I haven’t seen him down at SpaceX [headquarters in Texas] in at least two weeks."