A number of Instagram and Threads accounts tracking the private jets of celebrities including Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian have been removed without warning due to “the risk of physical harm to individuals”.

US college student Jack Sweeney runs a number of social media accounts using publicly available data to reveal the departures and arrivals of the private jets belonging to celebrities, including Elon Musk, Taylor Swift and Jeff Bezos.

This week Sweeney revealed that these accounts had been abruptly removed from Instagram and Threads, both owned by Facebook parent company Meta.

In a post on Threads, Sweeney said he was not given any warning about the ban or any reasons for it, with the jet tracking accounts now appearing “blacked out with no options to interact or receive information”.

No warning

“What makes this more troubling is that I’ve received no communication from Meta – no warnings, no explanation,” Sweeney posted.

“These platforms operate without transparency, and it feels like they make arbitrary decisions.

“These platforms don’t care about transparency.

“They selectively enforce their rules, allowing some users to stay while others are shut down without reason.”

In a statement to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Meta said the accounts were removed due to safety concerns.

“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 policy,” the Meta spokesperson said.

This Oversight Board recommended that information about individuals’ residences be removed, even if they are publicly available, but this did not relate specifically to private flights.

The accounts had been operating on these platforms for years without any issues, Sweeney said.

“It’s wild how tracking public info can be so controversial – my flight-tracking accounts on Instagram and Threads hadn’t violated rules for years,” Sweeney posted.

“I don’t know solidly who or what the motivator here was for Meta.

“Suddenly they care about something they haven’t for years?”

He said that tracking these private jets has a legitimate purpose.

“It has journalistic value, [and] reveals obviously many parts of a CEO’s work or what partnerships may occur,” Sweeney told NBC News.

“It also brings awareness to the very fact they are flying and the climate side.”

A long-running battle

The accounts created by Sweeney are based on coded bots that post whenever private jets owned by celebrities take off or land at a runway, pulling data from public flight logs and matched to tail numbers known to belong to these individuals.

The accounts tracked the movements of private jets belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.

In total, Sweeney said that at least 38 of his accounts have been suspended across different social media platforms.

They have been highly controversial for several years, with Elon Musk once offering Sweeney $US5,000 to remove an account tracking his private jet, before eventually banning the account when he bought what was then known as Twitter in late 2022.

Musk said it was a “security risk” that was posting his “assassination coordinates”.

Pop star Taylor Swift also threatened legal action against Sweeney over a similar account tracking her own plane, with that account also eventually taken offline.

Sweeney has since launched new accounts on X tracking the private jets of these celebrities on a 24-hour delay to comply with the company’s privacy rules, and these accounts remain online.

He said the latest banning from the Meta platforms was “reminiscent of all [his] accounts getting suspended on Twitter”.