Well things just got more interesting. Shortly after our post went up the tweet disappeared mysteriously.
Meanwhile over at Cult of Mac pro bono TechCrunch fact-checker Lonnie Lazar decided to scan the Verizon Twitter account looking for the tweet we referenced, to no avail. And when he found a similar tweet from January 7th sent from CoTweet, decided to write a blog implying that we had Photoshopped the above image.
“But could it also be an opportunity for one of the most widely followed tech blogs on the net to indulge in a bit of traffic-ramping scammery?”
Um no. Aside from the fact that we weren’t the only ones to see it, the original tweet had a status URL of https://twitter.com/Verizon/status/23790300849766400 and unique Tweet ID which has since been deleted. But not from Google search. Go ahead, try it yourself.
Lo and behold, there’s our disappearing tweet, sent 9:17 AM Jan 8th via, that’s right, Twitter for iPhone. Heh.
When we spoke to him on the phone, Verizon representative Jeffrey Nelson told TechCrunch he had had heard rumors of the tweet but couldn’t verify it since it no longer existed on the @Verizon account. Request for further explanation as to why it no longer existed was met with “No comment.” Twitter has also yet to return our request for comment.
And again, there are plenty of explanations for why some Verizon employee would be tweeting from an iPhone, but there are significantly less for deleting a tweet. Somebody, somewhere panicked.


Authors: Alexia Tsotsis