In this case, however, we’re pretty sure the suspension has nothing to with silencing conservatives.
Amidst all the #Juliagate goings-on yesterday, a Twitter parody account was created. Since then, @LifeOfJuIia had built up a pretty solid following. This afternoon, though, several people noticed that the account had been suspended. In light of the recent rash of account suspensions, it was not such a leap to suggest that Twitter had also allowed abusers to shut down the parody account.
But here’s what we think happened: the parody account’s handle is actually written as @LifeOfJuIia, where the L in “Julia” has been replaced with a capital I (“eye”). The @LifeOfJulia account, in which the L in “Julia” is in fact an L, belongs to a woman in Sweden. As the parody account increased in popularity, more and more people tweeted at the Swedish woman by mistake and her account was bombarded by tweets from people she didn’t know. To her, it seemed that she was the target of spammers, and so it would make sense that Twitter might suspend the account that initiated the problem.
We could be wrong, of course, but right now, it appears that #Julia’s Twitter account was an unfortunate casualty of look-alike letters.
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