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I sort of vaguely was aware of this story but my initial read was skepticism because it seemed just way too blatant. In case anyone is curious about my thought process, I wondered whether Sweeney either took down his own account, or intentionally got his account suspended some other way (the publicity motive seemed plausible to me). But it does appear to be true that Twitter indeed updated their terms of service specifically to prohibit sharing live location information. I find all this confusing because Musk's tweet about his commitment to not banning Sweeney's account still hasn't been deleted. I can understand Musk being annoyed at Sweeney's account, but this seems like a needlessly pointless way to burn credibility, and just weird and erratic behavior from Musk. He's the face of a $44 billion company, what exactly is the end game here? One last thing that remains curious to me is why would facebook and instagram also prevent people from sharing the elonjet account? It doesn't make sense that they would want to carry water for Musk, so I wonder if something else is going on.
When Musk first took over Twitter, this was my prediction:
I didn't expect a speedrun
My guess is that initially (in the heady days when he was going to buy Twitter and "save" it) Musk was willing to bite the bullet and say "Yeah, even the asshole who's electronically stalking me, I'll prove my commitment to my principles by not banning him."
What probably happened was not so much that Musk suddenly did a 180 and decided to ban the guy who was an irritant to him personally, but once he dug into how Twitter moderation did (and didn't work), and also talked to lawyers, he had to start revising his ideas of what should and shouldn't be allowed. And if you can track a billionaire's travel itinerary and current location, why can't you do that to anyone you don't happen to like?
Whether he came down on the right side of "free speech," I don't know, and it will depend a lot on how evenly this rule gets enforced.
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