Update to this update: Elon Musk has now restored @HelicoptersOfDC, along with other suspended accounts. “The people have spoken,” he tweeted, referring to a Twitter poll he’d created the day before: 58.7 percent of voters thought the accounts should be immediately reinstated.
After Elon Musk banned Twitter accounts that revealed an aircraft’s location on Wednesday, we gave Andrew Logan, the man behind Helicopters of DC, a call. His account uses crowdsourced and publicly available data to identify choppers flying through DC airspace.
Yesterday, he guessed that he’d likely be safe since he uses mostly crowdsourced information (i.e., people willingly share their location along with a pic of the helicopter above them). But less than 24 hours later, his account is now suspended.
Logan was on his way to go skiing this morning when a friend alerted him to the news. We caught up with him shortly after that, as he was still gathering his thoughts:What are you seeing when you log on?
When I log into Twitter, it just says, “Your account is permanently suspended,” and I don’t have an email from Twitter explaining why, so that’s kind of frustrating. But I’m not surprised. Yesterday, I told you that this is going to start affecting journalists—and then, three hours later, [Musk] started suspending journalists for no clear reason. So I’m not surprised.
It doesn’t specifically say why you were suspended?
No, it says I can submit an appeal. But they haven’t given me the context by which I’ve been suspended, so I don’t know what I’m appealing. I had been abiding by their their new policy. I do wonder if this is related to a Patreon I had just penned. It was very brief, not revealing anything about @Elonjet [the account that prompted Musk to create the policy], but I had just posted an article called “Fragile Billionaires Hate This One Crazy Trick.” I don’t know if that tipped it off.”
What’s interesting is that another sub account called UFOs of DC has not been suspended. This is pretty interesting, because if you go to UFOs of DC, you can hear the latest transmissions from the DCA tower, and you can see an ADS-B screen[shot] of what is flying over the city. I would think this would be a much more obvious violation for them, so this leads me to believe that I am being flagged for dissent and not explicit violation.
Do you think someone might’ve reported you?
It is possible. We’ve kind of theorized that any angry helicopter pilot or someone who doesn’t like me that’s claiming to be a helicopter pilot could report [me by arguing] their location is revealed by the clear observation of them in the sky from a person exercising their First Amendment right, simply by saying, “There’s a helicopter flying over me.” [If that’s the case], apparently, by Twitter’s vague policy, a picture of a helicopter is now considered doxxing the person who’s flying that helicopter. I don’t really follow that logic, but that may be what happened.
What’s next?
We are just starting to move people over to Telegram, but I don’t have the bot set up to do what it used to do there. So it’s not really there yet, but it’s pretty clear to me that Telegram is going to be the next move because they allow geolocation and that’s important to us for data submission.
Last thoughts?
I think it’s becoming abundantly obvious that [the new policy] affects journalism and open source intelligence techniques that have been transformative in the revealing of corruption and misdeeds, the movement of dictators, and just generally allowing people to know who is flying and circling around their house at any given time. It’s also inherently public information. I believe it’s a form of free speech and I hope that Elon realizes that.
