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In recent months, it’s been hard to look away from the trainwreck we’ve been treated to thanks to Elon Musk’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Twitter Acquisition. That saga has been filled with plenty of twists and turns, and we were treated to yet another interesting development on Wednesday.
Last year, the increasingly ignominious billionaire offered the college student behind an @ElonJet—an account devoted to tracking the movement of his private plane—$5,000 to shut down the project. The enterprising undergrad responded by asking for $50,000, and he continued to post updates after Musk not only declined the counteroffer but ended the negotiations by blocking him.
Shortly after Musk finalized the $44 billion deal that made him the proud new owner of Twitter in October, he attempted to bulk up his reputation as a champion of free speech by affirming he would allow the account to keep operating. However, that changed on Wednesday when @ElonJet was suspended thanks to a new policy that purports using the platform to share publically available information about an individual’s location and travel itinerary qualifies as “doxxing.”
At the end of the day, Musk is well within his right to rule over his digital domain however he sees fit. However, that seemingly self-interested move stems from a new policy based on some incredibly broad language that’s very open to interpretation and raises a number of questions about some potentially wide-reaching ramifications.
That includes the impact it could have on the many college football fans who’ve historically read way too much into the movements of private planes affiliated with certain schools. There have been a number of instances where flight info concerning the supposed travels of athletic directors and coaches has fueled rumors connected to open positions and possible defections, including the University of Tennessee’s search to replace Jeremy Pruitt at the start of 2021.
As things currently stand, there’s no real way to know if the college football sickos who live and die with those kinds of updates will actually be deprived of them until someone puts the new policy to the test. The fact that it currently makes exceptions for instances related to a “newsworthy event” or with the potential to “further public discourse on issues or events of public interest” does open up the door for a possible defense, but we’ll just have to wait and see.