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The Mysterious Premature Death of @ReutersHulk

After less than a day of life, the anonymous Twitter parody account @ReutersHulk got shut down and nobody knows why.

By Rebecca Greenfield
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After less than a day of life, the anonymous Twitter parody account @ReutersHulk got shut down and nobody knows why. Launched this morning, anyone viewing the page now sees the sad epitaph: "The profile you are trying to view has been suspended."

The account got started in the first place as the marriage of two memes, making fun of a post by Reuters social media guy Anthony De Rosa asking whether Reuters should use caps in tweets Twitter and the classic HULK Twitter meme. Thinking maybe an offended De Rosa had something to do with it, we reached out to him. But he said he didn't ask Twitter to pull the account. "I can tell you that I didn't," he said (over Twitter direct message, of course.) He pointed out that he was a fan of the parody. A Reuters spokesperson also denied the organization had anything to do with it. "We've had nothing to do with it going up or coming down," wrote Reuters spokesperson Barb Berg in an email.

With Reuters out of the picture, we went to Twitter. But the site does not comment on individual accounts, it told The Wire, because of privacy issues. There's just one other party that we could think of who could be involved, and that's Marvel which publishes the Hulk comic books. Perhaps they're defending their trademark? But if so, why would this Hulk parody be any different from the other other Hulk parodies that are still going strong? We'll update if we learn more about this mysterious disappearance.

Update June 26, 8:20 a.m: The plot thickens: The creator of the Drunk Hulk twitter account told The Atlantic Wire via email that he has not had any trouble from Marvel comics. "Marvel has been enormously patient with DH and the other numerous other Twitter Hulks," he wrote to us. We've reached out to Marvel for further comment. But, if not Marvel, then who?

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.