Posted On Social Media
As long as it does not make millionaires feel even slightly uneasy, almost anything can be posted on social media.
Social media’s billionaires want to be clear about what can and cannot be posted online.
As long as it is appropriately tagged, almost everything is OK on X (previously Twitter), including erotica, cryptocurrency scams, and neo-Nazi propaganda.
The regulations are a little more stringent for Facebook and Instagram, but it is still easy to find false information about the election (“they are eating the dogs”).
Fake news about hurricane relief funds, fictitious celebrity feuds, or artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images that claim, for instance, that Hurricane Milton destroyed Disney World (it didn’t).
One thing, however, neither business would put up with: tracking its owners’ private jet trips in public.
View this: On Monday, Meta terminated a number of Instagram and Threads accounts that tracked the movements of private jets owned by celebrities.
Including one owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
The CEO of Meta, using publicly available data. Other accounts that followed Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis.
Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner were all operated by Jack Sweeney, a college student from Florida.
Two years after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and temporarily disabled Sweeney’s “ElonJet” feed.
Which was subsequently restored with a 24-hour notice to adhere to the website’s privacy guidelines.
Sweeney’s Instagram and Threads accounts have been suspended.
Sweeney posted on Tuesday on Bluesky, the closest thing to a pre-Musk Twitter on the internet.
“Today gives a sense of deja vu.” “It seems like these platforms make judgments arbitrarily and operate without transparency.”
Sweeney stated that he got “no communication from Meta — no warnings, no explanation.” Sweeney claims that 38 of his accounts have been suspended on various social networking platforms.
The public personalities Sweeney tracks are not very fond of the spotlight. Sweeney was accused of “stalking and harassing behavior” by Taylor Swift’s lawyers in a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.
We can all agree that Swift is a gem, and we do not want anything bad to happen to her. or in any form! However, it is not as if Sweeney surreptitiously bugged her aircraft and then made her every step public.
Sweeney’s technique is based on a public database that US authorities keep on all private aircraft owners in the country.
Identified by the aircraft’s tail number. Sweeney merely made it a little more convenient, but anyone can accomplish the same thing.
It is just unclear if Meta is as concerned about the privacy and well-being of its users as Zuckerberg is.
Though it has not really addressed the very real issue of disinformation on its platforms.
The corporation has greatly increased its efforts to control harmful and fraudulent content.
Instagram, for example, has introduced “teen account” settings that limit the types of content that young people may view and are set to “private” by default.
Nearly three years had passed since a whistleblower leaked hundreds of internal documents that suggested.
Meta knew about the negative impacts its products were having but had taken no action to stop them.
According to court documents from recent lawsuits against Meta, as my colleague Clare Duffy recently wrote, Zuckerberg allegedly repeatedly blocked efforts to promote teen well-being, Meta purposefully refused to close accounts belonging to children under the age of 13, and the company has provided opportunities for child predators. Zuckerberg expressed regret to families who said social media had injured their children during a January Senate hearing.
Imagine if Zuck’s security detail had to conduct a further search of the location he just flew to in his actual private jet. You think that is awful.
The irony of Sweeney’s accounts being suspended by Meta is that the action acknowledges the amazing power (and danger) associated with persuasively combining and amplifying facts.
In essence, Meta is saying: Sure, anyone could use publicly available data to locate Zuck’s jet.
But you have to realize that when an algorithm automatically pushes something into your line of sight.
It is the kind of thing that could motivate someone to, say, do something evil.
Oh! You mean that anyone may create a false rumor online about people devouring dogs.
For example, but when Facebook’s algorithm encourages participation in that rumor, it might potentially spiral out of control?
Gee. I suppose this week has taught us all a valuable lesson on how to responsibly share sensitive information.
