Julian Assange's Twitter account is back, but the mystery remains
UPDATED Dec. 25, 2017, 11:04 a.m. ET It's back now.
With little fanfare and zero explanation, Julian Assange's Twitter account reappeared on Monday morning. It's a Christmas something-or-other.
The WikiLeaks founder has tweeted two times since his account came back online, though neither one addresses the reason for the disappearance. One tweet features a cartoon of Santa Claus adding WikiLeaks to his "Nice" list as he stares at the organization's Wikipedia entry. The other is a request for donations.
It's still not clear why Assange's account went away to begin with, though — as noted below — the nature of its non-appearance suggested at the time that it was a manual deletion rather than an account suspension.
Twitter had no comment on the matter, save for directing us to check out the company's instructions for users that want to deactivate and reactivate their accounts, which notes that "account data (such as Tweets, followers, favorites, etc.) may take a few minutes to fully restore."
The big mystery may be that Assange (or whomever else has the keys to his account) accidentally clicked something and didn't realize it until later. Without a whistleblower, we may never know.
Original post follows:
WikiLeaks founder and notorious Ecuadorian embassy resident Julian Assange has seemingly deleted his Twitter account, throwing his supporters into a frenzy of speculation on Christmas Day.
A search on desktop for his account, @JulianAssange, turned this up on Christmas morning:
Image: screenshot/twitter
This would suggest that it was deleted on his end, rather than suspended by Twitter. When you search for a suspended Twitter account, it redirects you to a different message. We got this one by searching for twitter.com/JaydaBF, the far-right Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen who President Donald Trump retweeted.
Image: screenshot/twitter
Mashable has reached out to Twitter for comment.
In the meantime, speculation and conspiracy theories were trending in the UK on Christmas morning.
CENSORSHIP? Julian Assange Vanishes Off Twitter
A source who works closely with WikiLeaks told the Gateway Pundit that they were not aware of any plans for Assange to deactivate his account on his own.https://t.co/U5fhIWRBYL— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) December 25, 2017
Now why would @Twitter ban Julian Assange when he was prepping to drop something big? Who is @Twitter trying to protect by this drop of information?
— James Brower 🍦🍦 (@jbro_1776) December 25, 2017
Julian Assange was kicked of twitter today cuz he dared to expose the Dem party and the Clinton crime family. Let’s make this very clear. I have never tweeted about Seth Rich. But I believe we can now say, without a shadow of a doubt, the DNC/Clinton’s had him murdered.
— Lawrence Polyakov (@Larrypolya22) December 25, 2017
According to the Wayback Machine internet archive, Assange's most recent tweet is from Friday.
Image: screenshot/wayback machine
We will update this story as soon as we get more information. Assange can almost certainly avail himself of several other social media accounts: @WikiLeaks, and those of the cat who keeps him company in his embassy exile, @EmbassyCat and on Instagram.
Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. He faces rape allegations in Sweden, which he denies, and is seeking asylum as he believes that if he leaves the embassy he will be extradited to the U.S. over WikiLeaks' publications.
UPDATED Dec. 25, 2017, 4:11 p.m. ET with Twitter's response to our comment request.
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