Update 2:10 p.m.: Twitter sent Margarita Noriega, the woman behind @ReutersHulk a message saying the account got suspended for wild @-reply use, she told The Atlantic Wire via e-mail. "This account was suspended for sending multiple unsolicited messages using the @reply and/or mention feature," reads the message. "Using either feature to post messages to a bunch of users in an unsolicited or egregious manner is considered an abuse of its use, which results in account suspension. As this appears to be a repeat violation, this account will not be restored," it says. Noreiga says she didn't think her use was abnormal. But thinks it might have had something to do with the newness of the account. She got too friendly, too fast.
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Original: The woman behind @ReutersHulk has revealed herself in a Tumblr post, but she has little additional information about why the account got taken down. When the parody account got suspended last week, we tried to figure out what had happened to it, with little success. Now that Margarita Noriega, a PR associate who started it as a "friendly joke," has revealed herself (following an anonymous interview she gave to Roll Call's Ryan Teague Beckwith) as the woman behind the all caps tweets, we figured she might have insight on why her own account got suspended. But, alas, no. "Twitter has a suspension process that lacks transparency and appeal, so poor Reuters Hulk had an untimely end," she writes. "More problematically, Twitter’s policy is to never say why they suspend any account. Unless Twitter wants to be transparent about it, the cause for suspension will never be revealed." Not even the Hulk herself knows what she did wrong.
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We've reached out to Noriega for more information and will update the post with any more details.
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Update 1:40 p.m.: Talking with Noriega we get a few more clues, but still haven't solved the mystery. Shortly after the account went up, after about two dozen rapid-fire tweets by Noriega's estimate, Twitter put the Hulk in Twitter jail -- an automatic suspension for a certain rate of tweeting. After five minutes of that, she resumed tweeting at a slower pace, once every thirty minutes she says. "I slowed down, I got scared," she told The Atlantic Wire. A couple hours later, after about four or five hours of life, the account was gone. She got a message about the suspension with a link to a general policy that "tells you nothing," she says. "There is no way to find out why they did it," she told us. She sent an e-mail to Twitter, they have not responded.
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Noriega does not think she tweeted anything too offensive, and as she points out the Reuters folks laughed with her. Her personal Twitter account doesn't have any off-putting tweets, at least. This, however, is not the first time Noriega has gone through this. She had a parody account, the identity of which she would not disclose, suspended a couple years ago, going through the same black hole process with no success. Perhaps her track record set a Twitter alarm off?