People seem to be of the opinion that banning Jack Sweeney’s jet tracking account is an attack on free speech and therefore exposes Elon Musk’s hypocrisy. No, it isn’t.
Twitter has rolled out a new policy that bans users from sharing live locations of others on the platform – just hours after Elon Musk suspended ‘ElonJet’ that was tracking his private jet.
Musk banned the account created by 20-year-old Jack Sweeney Wednesday while noting he is taking legal action against the Florida man. And hours later, Twitter published tweets about an update to its Private Information policy.
Twitter Safety posted that sharing an individual’s live location increases the risk of physical harm, and all such tweets will be removed and the creator’s account suspended.
Musk had previously vowed to keep Sweeney’s account up following his $44 billion takeover of the tech giant, but the mogul has had a change of heart.
On Wednesday at 7:13 pm ET, the Chief Twit posted: ‘Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation.’
Although Sweeney was accessing publicly available information, what he was doing was all but stalking. Doxxing is rightly frowned upon. And that is what this is. Our addresses are available if you seek them out. Someone publishing them on the Internet is doxxing and exposes us to risk from any nutter who decides to make use of the information, which is why people do it. This is no different. Sweeney is a stalker and stalking is not an expression of free speech. In this instance, a car containing Musk’s son was intercepted by one such nutter. Given his high profile, a degree of privacy over his movements is understandable and I’m with him on this one. Sweeney is a creep, frankly.
I don’t know why Musk is getting so uppity about this. Any fule no that Elon Musk can always be located somewhere up inside his own colon.
And what have you accomplished recently?
Jealousy is such an ugly look.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, there is obvious scope for mission creep here, as “sharing an individual’s live location” could be virtually anything where a 3rd party is referenced/photographed etc without their knowledge, posted at the time.
Yes, there’s that possibility. However reasonable people can tell the difference between posting a picture of a party and tracking someone’s movements and posting it online.
The latter is at best creepy obsessive behaviour and at worst stalking. This guy was asked to stop. He chose not to and now there’s been a real world consequence.
I’m a free speech absolutist, but I’m with Musk on this one.
I enjoy the climate virtue signallers having to defend there private jet mileage, but that is more meaningful to do on an annual or year-to-date basis, it certainly doesn’t need to be real time, which is voyeuristic verging on stalking.
The incident with Musk’s kid is repellent if true, by which I mean that I don’t know the circumstances or background rather than “It didn’t happen”.
Me too.
And yes, there will be issues sooner rather than later, because I doubt Musk has fully cleaned the Twitter Augean stables and installed enough ‘reasonable people’ replacements to prevent BiK’s point coming true, but hey, omelettes, eggs….
Forget where I first saw the remark (can’t claim it alas) but applied to musk it is rather fitting.
So far up his own arse he lives on a houseboat in his own alimentary canal.
Whatever you think of musk, good, bad or indifferent, there is no question he is a monumental attention whore. A veritable attention whore of Babylon!
He’s gonna have to go some to beat Meghan Markle and her ginger puppet, Mark….