Meta is banning accounts that track the jets of celebrities like Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. It’s not a bad idea.

Elon Musk and Taylor Swift had attracted accounts on Threads that tracked the movements of their private jets. Meta has now banned those accounts.

Meta’s move to suspend accounts that tracked the private jets of celebrities — including Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Taylor Swift — actually makes some sense.

But why suspend the accounts now when they’d been active for months? Meta isn’t answering that question.

The suspensions of the flight-tracker accounts on Instagram’s Threads come after Elon Musk zapped @elonjet in 2022. That was a Twitter account run by a college student who tracked Musk’s private jet flights. After proclaiming his dedication to free speech, Musk’s ban showed that he was making up moderation policy on the fly.

Meta, at least, has given an explanation that fits with its existing policy on privacy.

Let’s agree on a few things first with these flight trackers

The suspensions have kicked up a discussion online. Let’s agree on a few things before we get into it:

Yes, the flight information is public, but it’s not particularly easy for someone unfamiliar with aviation to find it. Removing the trackers from social media adds a layer of friction that could probably stop some potential stalkers or other people seeking to harm these celebrities.

Yes, these flight tracker accounts existed on Threads for months until suddenly — with apparently no warning or communication from Meta — they got canned.

Yes, Musk and Donald Trump are out campaigning for a presidential election. This makes their movements more newsworthy than, say, Kylie Jenner’s or Kim Kardashian’s. Knowing which states a candidate and his megadonor are visiting has a credible public benefit.

What is Meta’s reason for banning the accounts?

Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, gave a statement to B-17 about the suspensions: “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.”

Meta is pointing to an Oversight Board recommendation from 2021 about posts with people’s home address information. The board, which says it provides “an independent check on Meta’s content moderation,” recommended generally banning posts that exposed residential information — even if that information was publicly available.

For most private citizens, this seems reasonable. My home address is technically in the public record, but I don’t want people posting it on Facebook. You probably feel the same about your own address.

The board spells out the difference between information being in the public record and information being posted on social media:

Public records and other sources of what could be considered “publicly available” information still require resources and effort to be accessed by the general public. When that information reaches social media, however, it may be shared and accessed on a much bigger scale, which significantly increases the risk of harm as a result.

You can see what Meta is doing here: It’s applying the logic about posting the home address of a normal citizen and expanding it to the private jet data of famous people. This isn’t exactly apples-to-apples, but I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable.

That’s different from many of Musk’s content-moderation decisions, which feel more slapdash and based on his own whims.

Imagine this is about Kim and Taylor, not Elon

But forget about Elon for a minute.

Instead, imagine this was about Swift and Kardashian, celebs who have faced numerous credible security threats. Kardashian has talked about how she takes care not to post her location when she’s traveling after a horrific armed robbery in 2016. It feels reasonable that Meta would apply the 2021 Oversight Board recommendation about how some technically public information shouldn’t be allowed if it creates a risk of harm.

But why now? Why is Meta reaching back to a 2021 recommendation and applying it now to flight information? Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether a specific incident triggered these suspensions.

It certainly does feel like a celebrity might have personally complained to Meta. Or maybe Meta just wants to cater to the needs of some of its biggest celebrity posters, like Swift and Jenner. Or maybe Mark Zuckerberg just noticed his own jet-tracking account, got annoyed, went into “founder mode,” and got the trackers shut down.

Ultimately, I think there’s a good argument that someone’s safety trumps the dissemination of public information. But I can’t shake the feeling that Meta retrofitted that explanation onto something it wanted to do anyway.