What happened to ProfJeffJarvis? The popular parody account vanished from Twitter on Tuesday morning, and a dismayed tech community wants to know why. So far, it’s unclear if Twitter (TWTR) censored the account or if there is more to the story. (Update 6:30PM: It looks like @ProfJeffJarvis has returned to the delight of tech folks and the probable chagrin of the real Jeff Jarvis – read on to see what the day’s fuss was about).
If you’re unfamiliar with @ProfJeffJarvis, the account is named for media theorist Jeff Jarvis and delights in skewering the boundless self-importance of the tech community. Sample tweets: “I’m sharing my herpes status with Luhu! Sign up at[…] to win a $5 Amazon gift card!” … “Do you follow a hypershareability paradigm? And if not, why not?”
The account was run by Rurik Bradbury, who Digiday last year described as a “mild-mannered Englishman” who is waging “war on digital media’s ‘thinkfluencer’ echo chamber.” As my Fortune colleague Erin Griffith noted, both the accounts of @ProfJeffJarvis and Bradbury’s own accounts went dark abruptly. But it’s still easy to find images of ProfJeffJarvis and his goofy headgear on the internet:
So who killed @ProfJeffJarvis? The real Jeff Jarvis never thought the account was funny, and on Tuesday he cheered its demise:
Happy days. Justice at last. https://t.co/FZJOuGhXYP
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) December 8, 2015
Fans of the parody account are blaming Jarvis for its disappearance, but he firmly denies he is responsible:
@jeffjohnroberts I could have but never did request that it be killed. I have no idea what happened. I never read it.
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) December 8, 2015
There is no reason not to take Jarvis at his word, so who did kill the account? It’s possible Twitter decided to suspend the account, as it did in 2013 when Bradbury tweeted a lewd image. But this time, the accounts of ProfJeffJarvis and Bradbury do not display Twitter’s standard “this account has been suspended” message—suggesting Twitter is not responsible. A company spokesperson contacted by email repeated Twitter’s longstanding position that it does not comment on individual accounts.
Thus, the most likely explanation may be that Bradbury (and his alter-ego) decided to sign off Twitter on his own accord. If this is the case, the move would come less than a month after what the Washington Post described as a “hard lesson” when one of Bradbury’s tweets related to the Paris shootings went viral. We’ll update if we learn anything further.
Finally, as you can see in the feature image to this story (grabbed from a cached version of Google), it looks like Bradbury briefly signaled his departure before the account went dark.
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