College football fans who populate the many active message boards and social media communities are well aware of the various flight trackers, which use publicly-available FAA data to show all of the planes—commercial and private—making their way across the country. When a school is conducting a coaching search, fans will obsess over finding which planes are coming and going from airports near their schools, looking for clues as to which coaches may be in the mix.
That could be coming to an end on one major platform: Twitter. On Thursday, the website abruptly changed its rules to ban links to or information from websites that track flights, as part of what Musk has called new “anti-doxxing rules.” With the decision, one notable account—Elon Jet, which tracked and tweeted Musk’s private jet—was suspended, along with prominent journalists from The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and other outlets who report on Musk and had written stories about Elon Jet in recent days.
College football fans and media are worried that one of the fun internet traditions of their sport could get caught in the middle.
This year’s coaching carousel is winding down, so the policy change may not have a major impact through the end of 2022. But by next winter, when coaches are quickly being hired and fired, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will be permissible on the network.
