Update: Twitter restored the suspended Helicopters of DC account early on Saturday morning, a decision that came at the same time that Elon Musk decided to lift the suspensions of a number of journalists he had initially accused of sharing his personal location.

“The people have spoken. Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now,” he tweeted at 12:18 on Saturday morning. The tweet referred to a poll he had run asking whether those accounts — which included reporters from The Washington Post, CNN, and NBC News — should be restored or not. Almost 60% of respondents said yes.

The suspension of the accounts — including Helicopters of DC — stemmed from a revised policy Twitter unveiled this week broadly prohibiting the sharing of information on a person’s live location. Musk insisted that information put him and others and risk, but critics said the policy was vague and overbroad.

The Helicopters of DC account was suspended on Friday morning without formal explanation; the account tracks helicopter traffic over the city, which is largely military and police. On Saturday morning, account creator Andrew Logan said he was informed that the suspension was linked to a June 2022 tweet that included a link to a flight-tracking website. He deleted the tweet and the account was restored.

Despite regaining his account, Logan said he would start relying less on Twitter in the future. “I stand by what I said: this is not a platform for free speech or aviation enthusiasts,” he tweeted.

Original: Andrew Logan may have tried to fly under the radar, but this week Elon Musk finally spotted him.

On Friday morning Logan’s three-year-old helicopter-tracking Twitter account, Helicopters of DC, was suspended by the social media platform as part of a newly revised policy that restricts the sharing of “live location information” that would “reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available.”

The revised policy was suddenly unveiled this week in the wake of Musk’s new war against Elon Jet, a Twitter account that used publicly available data to track the whereabouts of his private jet. Musk, who purchased Twitter for $44 billion earlier this year and has in the past described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” said the account’s sharing of flight data put him and his family at risk. Musk escalated the fight on Thursday, when the company suspended the accounts of more than a half-dozen reporters who had written about the new policy.

“I’ve been talking to everyone about how they come for the planes first and then they come for the journalists,” Logan tells DCist/WAMU. “So I’m not surprised that I fell within whatever algorithm they may be using.”

Logan, 34, first started the account in early 2020 as a pandemic hobby of sorts to better answer the question that many D.C. residents often have: What’s that helicopter flying over my neighborhood? He built a Twitter-based tracker using the ADS-B data, which aircraft use to share their locations and is available to the public. (This is the same data that Elon Jet used to track Musk’s plane.) But Logan went a step further, using air traffic control radio and crowdsourced tips to better locate and track helicopters flying over and around the city.

“I live by Logan Circle and we call it the Helicopter Highway, because while any military media office will tell you, ‘We care about the community and we fly at prescribed routes and elevations,’ there’s actually a secret helicopter route to fly between the prohibited zones of the Naval Observatory and the Mall. And that puts them right over Dupont Circle and Logan Circle and across the city at a low altitude,” says Logan.

What may seem like a quirky hobby to some is actually valuable public information to Logan. “When [police] are chasing a car, people can go on a flight-tracking app and they can see that this helicopter registered to the police is circling an area. And as a public safety measure, people can not go to that area,” he says.

As of this week, Helicopters of DC had almost 16,000 followers. Now, it’s gone.

Logan says that Twitter’s new policy is “incredibly vague,” so much so that it’s certain to have unintended and unnecessary consequences. He also told Washingtonian that he takes issue with Musk’s argument that sharing such location data could put someone in harm’s way. “Any information can possibly be used for harm. The example that I use is, do you think we should be reporting on the bake sale at the school? Because it’s possible someone could use that information for harm,” he told the magazine.

Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The policy is also an odd fit for D.C., which has some of the country’s most restrictive airspace. Logan says at least half of all the helicopters he has tracked have been military, and much of the remaining ones are flown by the multiple police agencies that operate in the city. It’s highly unlikely that Musk would ever be able to fly a personal helicopter into the city’s airspace; a few years ago, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos floated the idea of having a helipad at his HQ2 in Crystal City, which would have required jumping through multiple local, regional, and federal hoops.

For the time being, Logan says he’s not holding out much hope for Twitter. He wasn’t offered any formal explanation as to why his account was suspended, but he was given a chance to appeal the decision, “kind of like a Russian court proceeding,” he says dismissively. But in a video recorded shortly after being suspended on Friday, Logan said that “it has become clear to me that Twitter is not the platform for free speech, it is not the platform for aviation enthusiasts.”

“It’s troubling,” agrees Alan Henney, a longtime crime reporter who scans police and emergency responder radio traffic to suss out details on homicides and other incidents. He has also shared helicopter data. “I’ve been in Andrew’s helicopter chat group on Twitter since it started. Twitter management is out of touch with reality. I hadn’t thought about being banned too, but I started sending my posts to Instagram and Facebook months ago.”

Logan has already set up a Helicopters of DC Telegram account, and says people can use a helicopter-tracking map he helped set up. As for Musk, who said on Twitter on Thursday that the new policy was intended to protect people from “doxxing,” Logan has little good to say.

“This is an unstable individual,” he says. “I’m not a therapist, but it seems like he’s not sleeping enough to me. You know, all the symptoms of paranoia and impulsivity would line up with not sleeping enough. If I could talk to Elon, I would say, ‘Hey, buddy, take a nap. Go get a full eight hours.'”