UPDATE: The Federal Aviation Administration offers two options for individuals and businesses that do not want their flight plans and data made public. The Limited Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) and the Privacy ACIO Address (PIA) gift airborne operators with virtual anonymity. Apparently, Musk or his legal team signed up with one or both of the services earlier this year.
The nuances and context of the First Amendment are being swept under the rug of subversion and urban myths facilitated by the ominous presence of social media and an increasingly gullible population coerced by the tech moguls dictating social morays equating to a destructive force.
While propaganda results in a prevalence of fake news and false information interpreted by the masses as fact, basic constitutional freedoms hang in the balance. As the idea of the street corner compared to the publicly traded private entity environment remains and ambiguous logical imperative to the impressionable minds of the younger generations, truth is obscured by a jaded layer of emotions.
Recently, the once evolving rockstar for freedom of expression at least within the digital realm, Elon Musk, reneged on his promise to liberate the vast and intricate digital communities. Similar to a driver of a Tesla indifferently clearing the windshield of insect carcasses after a tour through the Everglades, the world’s wealthiest human egregiously removed the Twitter account of an innovator, who in the scope of ingenuity, created a wonder measured by scalability and influence.
The account @ElonJet was deactivated Wednesday, briefly restored, and then ultimately vanished for what may be eternity.
The electronic teeter-totter of imposing, retracting, and then imposing corporate policy exposes the convoluted “Terms and Conditions” so dense with information that moderators and the big honcho himself are not able to make timely decisions and in the course of enforcing various mandates, accounts that do not violate the rules are often banished to a Russian penal colony.
The @ElonJet platform displaying Musk’s 9-minute flight from SJC to SFO.
@ElonJet was developed by a 20-year-old and college student Jack Sweeny, and along with building multiple bot accounts, his personal wall was torn down by Musk and associates. The company claims that there is no tolerance for tracking and posting the “location of an individual”, even though all non-military flight plans are public information, there exists a robust offering of flight tracker platforms and apps. Twitter officials quoted that Sweeny’s brainchild is in some way a form of “doxxing”, or purposefully disseminating personal information to harm an individual or group. It appears that the knee-jerk corporate response for a climate activist to be regularly outed for engaging in behavior that clearly cancels out his morally superior belief system is an early sign that the Twitter experiment is not going as planned.
The tycoon’s disturbing 180-degree pivot from his “First Amendment” campaign sets an ugly precedent for functional tweets, a partition of the platform that balances out the back-and-forth cumbersome political rants. The information displayed Sweeny’s @ElonJet was extrapolated from the public source of the Federal Aviation Administration in celebrating transparency and appealing to the curiosity of the end-user.
Earlier this year, the leader of the new Twitter regime offered Sweeny pocket change ($5000) to kindly terminate the account, a token gesture that was rightly refused. Sweeny countered and demanded $50 thousand which Musk refused. @ElonJet remained operational, until the moderators intervened and acted upon the orders of the monarch.
In a testament to the hypocrisy and irregular stipulations dictated by the Twitter bible regulating content, Musk pleaded dogma to the instantaneous backlash of online watchdogs to justify a burgeoning trend of a special interest epidemic of Twitter account vaporizations expected over the next few months. The mentality of the attack on free speech exemplifies the iron clad will of Silicon Valley, and a complete lack of accountability in branding social networks as realms of the free exchange of ideas. Instead, social media outlets are plagued by the presence of repressive shackles compromising dialogue and threatening the future construct of liberty.
Sweeny’s tracking engine exposed the sanctimony of the wealthy and those endorsing the Green movement in displaying the propensity of Musk and other dignitaries in racking up staggering “frequent” flier miles and putting their emphatic stamp on the carbon footprint. Included in the @ElonJet ledger, was a 9-minute 35-mile flight, where the Twitter owner allegedly flew in his 2015 Gulfstream G650ER jet from San Jose to San Francisco, sparking outrage from both sides of the political aisle.
As the story of Musk’s moderation whining has gone viral, any momentum that Tesla’s founder had garnered with moderate to right leaning citizens has quickly dissipated with Sweeny’s banishment. As the old saying goes, “A tyrant is not a tyrant, until heads start rolling and the truth is left twisted and mangled in the fetid wastewater of Tesla batteries.”