I awakened Friday morning to the message I’d been anticipating: “Your account, @Justin_Ling has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules.”

Below was the offending tweet: a hyperlink to one of many few web sites that present real-time personal jet flight knowledge that “chief twit” Elon Musk, I wrote, “hasn’t bullied into suppressing his flight data.”

Musk has accused these flight trackers of offering “basically assassination coordinates.” He has launched a campaign towards these apps and anybody who shares them on his not too long ago acquired social media platform. Accounts like mine had been locked, whereas others had been banned totally—from the @ElonJet bot, which shared the placement of Musk’s personal aircraft, to reporters who picked up on his marketing campaign. Twitter guidelines had been rewritten on the fly to forbid publishing anybody’s “physical location.”

The chaotic few days prompted the European Union to warn Musk that silencing journalists would doubtless end in sanctions from EU regulators. US Representative Adam Schiff demanded that Musk reinstate the suspended accounts and clarify to Congress why he determined to retaliate towards the press within the first place.

As of Monday, following a ballot asking customers when he ought to raise the account suspensions, Musk reinstated some—however not all—of these accounts. 

Lost within the chaos is simply how profitable Musk has been at suppressing that real-time flight knowledge on the web. In so doing, he’s taking goal at an extremely helpful supply of data—which has helped researchers, journalists, and consultants with every part from monitoring Russian oligarchs to investigating the destiny of lacking plane to monitoring down worldwide hitmen. Musk isn’t the one one attempting to maintain this sort of data out of the general public’s palms. 

Both real-time and historic data on Musk’s most important personal jet—a 2015 Gulfstream G650ER, tail number N628TS—is conspicuously lacking from the 2 most important flight-tracking platforms: FlightConscious and FlightRadar24.

FlightConscious experiences that its real-time knowledge on Musk’s jet is unavailable “due to European government data rules,” whereas its historic knowledge concerning the aircraft’s comings and goings was eliminated “per request from the owner/operator.” Looking up Musk’s jet on FlightRadar24 returns the message: “we could not find data.”

Even smaller monitoring platforms, like AirportInfo—the account that led to my Twitter being locked—have taken Musk’s flight data offline.

“The ongoing hullabaloo about the location of Elon Musk’s airplane has caused us to stop displaying his plane at the moment,” says Christian Rommes, an AirportInfo administrator. “Because Musk is threatening legal action, we don’t want to take any risks.”

While Rommes says his workplace hasn’t heard from Musk’s authorized group, they took the step as a precaution. “Don’t mess with the (former) richest man of the world,” he says.

Aircraft operators are required to report detailed data on their flight path to numerous nationwide regulators, together with the Federal Aviation Administration. That knowledge is usually a matter of public file and is printed to numerous web sites well-liked amongst airline fanatics. 

Some firms, like FlightConscious, increase authorities knowledge with their very own sources of real-time flight data. Other web sites, like planespotters.net and airliners.net, enable customers to submit images taken of plane as they arrive and go world wide.