Alec Baldwin Quit Twitter … Sort Of
Less than 24 hours after the Words with Friends game heard round the world that led to Alec Baldwin's boisterous removal from an American Airlines flight, the star's Twitter account is suspended. Baldwin's publicist said (on Twitter) that the star is "just focused on #30Rock for now," but it's unclear exactly whether Baldwin deactivated the account or Twitter simply put him in time out. New York is going with the "Alec Baldwin Has Quit Twitter" headline, but The Daily Dot reports on a more concerted effort by Baldwin to wipe the slate clean:
Baldwin did what many people do when they get overwhelmed by tweets: He changed his username from @AlecBaldwin to @deactivated001. … There are several ways to tell that @deactivated001 is Baldwin’s account. For one, his tweet about getting kicked off the American Airlines flight is still featured as a top tweet, albeit under his new username. The only way that can happen is if he changed the username on his account. Also, @deactivated001 retained Baldwin’s Twitter following of more than 600,000.
Indeed, @deactivated001 looks like it's full of all of Baldwin's old tweets. Twitter's definitely suspended the old account, though it's unclear exactly why. As The Daily Dot pointed out, Baldwin violated several of Twitter's rules with his name-change trick and apparently told his followers last night that he wanted to "crash this account." That tweet's now missing from @deactivated001. Instead, the latest tweet links to a grainy YouTube video of "The great Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw, performing the Mahler 9th." It's dramatic.
