It was as if they had vanished into thin air. This week, several accounts tracking public figures' private jet flights disappeared from Instagram, Facebook and Threads, three social media platforms belonging to the Meta group.

When trying to view Instagram and Facebook accounts that had been following Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's private plane, error messages – "Sorry, this page isn't available" and "This content isn't available right now" – are now displayed. The same goes for accounts publishing flights by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates or Kim Kardashian.

With this move, Meta has followed in the footsteps of X (then Twitter), which banned numerous similar accounts in 2022, as requested by Elon Musk, who had deemed such information to be dangerous for his family's safety. However, X did tolerate an account tracking Elon Musk's movements with a delay of "at least 24 hours."

According to Jack Sweeney, who runs the ElonJet account and is a leading figure in flight tracking, Meta has given no justification to the closed accounts' owners. The group did, however, tell US media outlet TechCrunch that the accounts posed a "risk of physical harm to individuals" and that the decision had been taken in agreement with its independent Oversight Board.

Flight tracking, which consists of tracking the movements of airplanes and private jets in real-time, or plotting out their prior flight paths, based on the signals they transmit via the ADS-B satellite system, has particularly been used by environmental activists to denounce the disastrous carbon footprint of very wealthy individuals, such as, in France, the @laviondebernard account, which is still online both on X and on Instagram.