The student who tracks Elon Musk's private jet said his Facebook page was taken down for 'impersonation'

• The student who tracks Elon Musk's private jet said his Facebook page was taken down on Wednesday.
• Jack Sweeney said Facebook cited "impersonation" for the decision, which he didn't understand.
• He said he would appeal against Facebook's decision and try to get his account restored.

The college student who tracks Elon Musk's private jet said his Facebook page was taken down Wednesday for "impersonation."

In a text message exchange with Insider, Sweeney said he didn't know why the social media company had unpublished his page. "I don't know what it is - if it's because I'm using his name it's weird," he said.

The University of Central Florida student shared a screenshot of the notice he was sent, notifying him that his page had been "unpublished" because "Elon Musk's jet goes against our Community Standards on impersonation."

Sweeney said he planned to appeal against Facebook's decision in a bid to restore his account.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.

It's not the first time Sweeney gone into battle with social media companies to keep his accounts online.

Early last year Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop sharing flight information online. The student said he would stop for $50,000, but that Musk never followed up on his offer.

Sweeney's accounts use bots to scrape and post publicly available flight data that anyone could find on ADS-B Exchange.

When Musk announced his plan to buy Twitter, Sweeney expressed concern about the prospect of his accounts being banned. At the time, he said he created backup pages on Facebook and Instagram.

After Sweeney's @ElonJet Twitter account did get banned in December, he began tweeting flight data with a 24-hour delay at @ElonJetNextDay to adhere to the social media app's updated private information policy that restricted users from sharing individuals' live locations.

Twitter also suspended more than 30 other accounts that used public flight data to track the movements of private jets used by prominent individuals such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Sweeney previously told Insider that the Twitter owner "seems really bothered" by his account following an interview that Musk gave to BBC News on April 11.