Almost anything goes on social media — as long as it doesn’t make billionaires feel even a little bit unsafe

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — The billionaires who control social media want to be clear about what’s OK to post online and what’s not.

For X (formerly Twitter), just about anything goes, including neo-Nazi propaganda, crypto scams and porn (as long as it’s labeled properly).

For Facebook and Instagram, the rules are a bit more restrictive, though it’s still not hard to find misinformation about the election (“they’re eating the dogs”), fake news about hurricane relief funds, fictional celebrity feuds, or AI-generated images purporting to show, for example, that Hurricane Milton destroyed Disney World (it didn’t).

But there’s one thing neither company will tolerate: Publicly tracking their owners’ private jet outings.

See here: On Monday, Meta suspended several Instagram and Threads accounts devoted to tracking — using publicly available data — the routes of various celebrities’ private jets, including one used by Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Other accounts, all run by a Florida college student named Jack Sweeney, tracked Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner.

“Given the risk of physical harm to individuals, and in keeping with the independent Oversight Board’s recommendation, we’ve disabled these accounts for violating our privacy policies,” a Meta spokesperson told CNN in an email.

The suspension of Sweeney’s Instagram and Threads accounts comes two years after Elon Musk bought Twitter and temporarily booted Sweeney’s “ElonJet” feed, which was later reinstated with a 24-hour delay to comply with the site’s privacy policy.

“Today brings a sense of deja vu,” Sweeney wrote Tuesday on Bluesky, the closest thing the internet has to a pre-Musk Twitter. “These platforms operate without transparency, and it feels like they make arbitrary decisions.”

Sweeney, who says he’s had 38 accounts suspended across social media sites, added that he received “no communication from Meta — no warnings, no explanation.”

The public figures Sweeney tracks don’t exactly love the attention. Earlier this year, Taylor Swift’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to Sweeney, accusing him of “stalking and harassing behavior.”

Which, like, sure — we can all agree Swift is a treasure and we don’t want to see any harm come her way. Or anyone’s way! But it’s not like Sweeney somehow secretly bugged her plane and then revealed her every move.

US authorities maintain a public database of all private plane owners in America, tracked by the aircraft’s tail number, and Sweeney’s algorithm is built on that data. Anyone can do the same thing — Sweeney just made it slightly more convenient.

It’s just not clear that Meta cares as much about its users’ privacy and wellbeing as it does about Zuckerberg’s.

The company has significantly stepped up its efforts to rein in fake and dangerous content, though it’s hardly solved the very real problem of disinformation on its platforms.

For instance, Instagram recently rolled out “teen account” settings that default to “private” and restrict what kinds of content young people can access. That move came nearly three years after a whistleblower exposed hundreds of internal documents suggesting Meta was aware of the harmful effects its products were having yet did nothing to address them.

As my colleague Clare Duffy wrote recently, court documents from recent lawsuits against Meta have alleged that Zuckerberg repeatedly thwarted teen well-being initiatives, that Meta knowingly refused to shut down accounts belonging to children under the age of 13 and that the company has enabled child predators. At a Senate hearing in January, Zuckerberg apologized to families who said their children had been harmed by social media.

You think that’s bad — imagine if Zuck’s security detail had to do an extra sweep of the venue he just flew to in his literal private jet.

The irony of Meta’s suspension of Sweeney’s accounts is that the move recognizes the incredible power (and risk) that comes with aggregating and amplifying data in a compelling way.

Meta is basically saying: Sure, anyone could find Zuck’s jet through public data but you have to understand that when an algorithm automatically forces into your field of vision, that’s the kind of thing that could inspire someone to, like, do something bad…

Oh! You mean the way anyone on the internet can start a fake rumor about people eating pets, say, but when Facebook’s algorithm automatically incentivizes engagement with that rumor, it’s the kind of thing that could … get out of hand?

Gee. I guess we’ve all learned an important lesson this week about the responsible dissemination of sensitive information.

The-CNN-Wire
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