Is a public account, using public data, that tracks a celebrity jet (Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Bill Gates etc) “stalking”, providing a "public service”, or is a benign ”curiosity”?
@chris It kind of depends on who’s doing the tracking and who’s being tracked. A dude tracking Taylor swifts jet is a creep. An organization tracking bill gates to make a point about climate change is not. As with all types of communication, context matters.
@chris Does it matter? Anyone could look up the info, but the entity creating a bot to post it to social media is communicating a message just by that act of creation. I’m okay with “Bill Gates is a hypocrite!” But less okay with “hey, here’s where Taylor Swift is, just in case you want to go abuse her.”
@chris Well, the bot owner obviously made the bot for some purpose. Otherwise they’d just go look it up on a flight tracker app if it was just personal curiosity.
@chris Personally I’m okay with threads banning it. They’re too big to effectively moderate contextually. This points to why the small instance mastodon model is a good one. Instances each get to decide how they feel about any given account.
