Elon’s Promise Not To Ban Account Tracking His Jet Didn’t Last Very Long At All; Also Bans Guy’s Personal Account

Content Moderation

from the hypocritical-oaf dept

Hilarious Update: A few minutes ago, the @ElonJet account returned to Twitter, but that came about 20 minutes after Elon himself justified the ban, saying it violated the company’s (new) doxxing policies (see the original update to this story at the bottom. Hilarious Update 2: And, a couple hours later, the account was suspended a second time. Anyway, in the meantime, the original post is here:

Earlier this week, we wrote about how Elon Musk had secretly applied the strongest visibility filter (what some people insist on calling “shadowbanning”) to the ElonJet account on Twitter (which automatically noted where Elon’s private plane was flying), which he had promised not to ban due to his apparent “commitment to free speech.”

The guy behind ElonJet had revealed, based on a Twitter insider whistleblower that new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin had demanded the heaviest “visibility filter” be applied to ElonJet (VF stands for “visibility filter.”)

On Wednesday morning, despite all of this the @ElonJet account was suspended:

Later in the day, the guy behind it, Jack Sweeney, announced that all of his accounts, including his personal account had been banned as well:

Over on Mastodon, Sweeney shared the message Twitter sent him to explain why he was banned. It… seems like made up bullshit.

If you can’t see that it says:

Your account, JxckSweeney has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.

Specifically, for:

Violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam.

And… what? Platform manipulation? Spam? Yeah, sure okay.

Now, as with any content moderation decision, we do like to keep reminding people that decisions are often made for reasons that aren’t entirely public or clear. So perhaps there’s some other explanation for this. Or it was a mistake. Or somehow Elon’s big new plans to stop spam (which banned tons of legitimate accounts earlier this week) are responsible for this.

But, on the whole, it once again raises some pretty obvious concerns about how the “new management” is handling these kinds of things — and the pure hypocrisy of Elon.

Indeed, the fact that anyone linking to the ElonJet account on Facebook or Instagram are being warned that it “may be unsafe” indicates that this is deliberate suppression:

Of course, all this has done in practice is call way, way, way more attention to Elon’s hypocrisy on this topic. Tons of major media publications are covering the story. And even the “Community Notes” feature, which Elon keeps talking up and renamed from the former “Birdwatch” has now attached a note on Elon’s old tweet promising not to remove the account:

So, hey, when do we get the “Twitter Files” with the internal discussion on this removal? C’mon Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Do some real reporting for once.

Update: So… apparently yesterday, Elon’s Twitter quietly updated its policy against sharing or private info to explicitly block sharing live location info:

It does not appear this policy is particularly well thought out, as it would appear to ban any tweet of anyone’s live information. So, reporting on the location of, say, the President. Or posting a selfie with some friends. Or, just noting that you saw so-and-so at this or that location. All now violates Twitter’s policies. Oh yeah, also, Twitter’s built in functionality that allows users to post their own location.

In the old days, at least, policy changes like this would have a team of people thinking through the consequences. But these days, it seems to just be based on Elon’s whims and little else.

Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, elonjet, free speech, hypocrisy, jack sweeney
Companies: twitter