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Accounts that follow celebrity private jets are removed from Instagram

Several famous private jet trackers have just been grounded.

Dozens of threads and Instagram accounts that track the trajectories of stars’ private planes were suspended this week, the Verge reported Tuesday. Jack Sweeney, the student behind the accounts, took to Threads to announce that they appeared to be hidden, with no explanation as to why they were removed.

“Today I have a feeling of deja vu, reminiscent of the suspension of all my accounts on Twitter,” Sweeney wrote. “What makes the situation even more troubling is that I have received no communication from Meta: no warning, no explanation.”

Sweeney, who rose to fame as the creator of the @ElonJet account on Twitter (now known as X), uses public flight path data to track the movements of many celebrities. Her accounts cover everyone from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to Kim Kardashian and Jeff Bezos. But as he mentioned, he’s already been shut down on Twitter and this week, noted The Verge.

Although Sweeney has received warnings and status updates regarding previous suspensions, he said these recent suspensions came without messages from Meta, which runs both Instagram and Threads. Instead, the accounts were hidden, with no way for Sweeney to interact with them or receive information about why they were deleted.

“Given the risk of physical harm to individuals, and in accordance with the recommendation of the Independent Oversight Board, we have disabled these accounts for violating our privacy policy,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an e -mail.

While Meta may have decided that Sweeney’s accounts didn’t meet company standards, flight tracking is a perfectly legal activity for anyone to undertake, at least for now. But this has historically raised questions about privacy, and Meta appears to support this argument. Sweeney fears, however, that the company’s actions could endanger transparency and that Meta would make “arbitrary decisions,” as he wrote online.

Yet even as Sweeney himself disparages Meta’s decision, the celebrities he followed might be celebrating; they can take off in their private planes without worrying that the entire internet will know where they are.