Internet company Meta has canceled accounts that tracked the private jet flights of public figures, including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Facebook, Instagram and Threads social media accounts owned by Meta shared the location of the private planes based on publicly available flight data. The newspaper Le Monde writes about it.
Photo: SITA/AP
Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the Meta Connect conference on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Menlo Park, California.
Most of these accounts were run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney, who became a leading figure in private flight tracking. It also tracks, for example, the flights of Governor Ron DeSantis, celebrity Kim Kardashian, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
According to Sweeney, Meta did not provide any reason to the owners of the canceled accounts. However, the group told US media outlet TechCrunch that the accounts posed “a risk of physical harm to individuals” and that the decision was made in consultation with its independent supervisory board, the Independent wrote.
“It has journalistic value, it reveals many aspects of the work of company directors or what partnerships could be made,” Sweeney told NBC News about his activity. “It also brings awareness to the very fact that they’re flying and the climate side of things,” Sweeney said.
Meta’s move follows X, formerly Twitter, which banned a number of similar accounts in 2022 at the behest of its boss, Elon Musk. According to him, the published information about the location of his plane threatened the safety of his family. However, the X Network tolerated an account tracking the movement of Musk’s plane at least 24 hours apart.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
