Twitter on the afternoon of December 14 blocked several accounts tracking the movements of the planes of American billionaires and Russian oligarchs. In the evening, the account of the author of some of these bots, a 20-year-old student from Florida, Jack Sweeney , also got blocked.
After Elon Musk's audience was outraged, on the night of December 14, the @ElonJet account returned online (the only one of all its author's bots), and Twitter issued an explanation about the block, specifying that now the privacy rules of the social network have changed , and it will delete data about the "current location" people whose data has been published. At the time of blocking Jack Sweeney's accounts, there were no such rules in Twitter policy, besides, posting the location of people in it is not uncommon: for example, when reporting and messages from the scene, meetings with politicians, as well as ordinary everyday situations when one user discloses the current location another or your friends. Twitter says it's still possible to post other people's whereabouts, but not until the next day (or 24 hours later).
A few days earlier, it was reported that Musk had contacted Sweeney and offered him $5,000 to delete an account that kept track of the new Twitter owner's business jet flights. And in November, Musk admitted that he was "so committed to the principles of free speech that he does not even block the account that publishes information about his plane." Sweeney says in an interview with NBC that Musk had earlier commented on his clarification that air traffic control was "primitive" and said he "didn't like the idea of being shot by some crazy people."
Bots created by Sweeney published information about the flights of Elon Musk and his SpaceX aircraft , Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, corporate jets of other US companies ( @Corporate_Jets ), as well as Russian state jets ( @PutinJet ) and private jets Russian oligarchs (account @RUOligarchJets ). Sweeney's list also included government aircraft from other countries. The bot, configured to monitor Musk's plane, worked not only on Twitter – it is also available on Facebook, Instagram, Discord and other sites. Only Sweeney's Twitter accounts have been banned.
Sweeney is not the only programmer to set up bots to publish information about the flights of persons and aircraft of public importance. A few years ago, one of the first such large-scale initiatives was the website and Twitter bots of the Dictator Alert network, developed by Emmanuel Freudenthal and Francois Pilet. Their accounts are still online. Analysts do not track business planes, but only state-owned ships (for example, in Russia, aircraft tail numbers begin with “RA-”) and only those countries that are designated as dictatorships within their project. These are more than 50 countries, which include some Arab countries, China, Venezuela, Iran, Belarus and others.
Among other things, Jack Sweeney added to his bots approximate calculations of fuel use by different aircraft and carbon dioxide emitted. In this regard, the planes of billionaires are of particular close attention. So, it is known that Elon Musk very often flies very short distances. In August 2022, he flew from San Francisco to San Jose, California, taking 9 minutes – that's five stops on the local commuter train.
Neither the US student nor the Dictator Alert team uses any secret data for their bots. Their work is based on receiving data from ADS-B (Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast) transmitters (transponders). Such transponders report to the ground about their position in space every few minutes, weather and other information. The presence of such a station on an aircraft and the transmission of information from it is mandatory for all aircraft and helicopters in the United States with almost no exceptions. In some other countries – in the European Union, some countries in Asia, Canada – the transmission of a signal to the ground from an aircraft is also mandatory, however, even where there is no strict rule, almost all aircraft use this technology, since it allows you to observe the movements of aircraft with great accuracy as the pilots themselves and the controllers.
It is on the basis of such data that the well-known portals for monitoring aircraft operate – Flightradar24 , RadarBox and others. These services are commercial, and owners of private jets can apply to block information about their flights from subscribers – this service is paid for them. However, there are also portals that do not fundamentally limit information about the movements of private jets – among them OpenSky and ADS-B Exchange. It was on their basis, using their own data processing algorithms, that Jack Sweeney's bots worked. However, as he stressed, the dissemination of such information is not prohibited by law. Moreover, you can even set up the receiver yourself and use it to receive all the information about aircraft flying nearby – even if they are blocked on popular services. This is exactly the way journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal once went, for his Dictator Alert project, he installed several antennas in different cities of Africa, where there are much fewer such stations than in the USA and Europe. Elon Musk's aircraft page on the ADS-B Exchange is still available to everyone.
