Twitter account Julian Assange briefly disappeared – update

Julian Assange’s Twitter account has disappeared. It is not clear at this time whether the Wikileaks foreman’s account was deleted by Assange himself, by Twitter, or by a malicious third party.

The disappearance happened sometime during the past weekend. The profile url now only shows that the requested page does not exist. If a Twitter user loses their account due to a rule violation, they will normally be notified. Assange’s latest tweet was a quote from himself, posted on Friday, according to the Google Cache. His organization’s account Wikileaks still exists, but it hasn’t tweeted since December 23. Multiple media outlets, including Gizmodo, have asked Twitter and Wikileaks for clarification, but there is still no response.

Assange was arrested in the United Kingdom in December 2010 at the request of Sweden. He is said to have been guilty of sexual offenses several times in the Scandinavian country. In 2012, he holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Australian said he was afraid of being extradited to the US via Sweden, because of the various WikiLeaks publications of US military secrets, including the Collateral Murder video. Assange is, as far as we know, still in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Update, 4:29 PM: Assange’s account is now back online, but at the time of writing without explanation about the disappearance. There is a new one tweet posted, but it doesn’t say anything specific. He also seems to have lost all his followers and the counter has started from zero again.