In 2023, Phoenix New Times named the account the Best Political Twitter Parody of the year. Graciously, the person behind the account returned the compliment, using a blurb from our coverage on the account's profile page.
Heading into the election, Thelma Johnson posted constantly and furiously, prodding at Lake, questioning (without any evidence) whether Trump staged his own assassination attempt and gloriously shitposting through it all.
But then, after day after day after day of flooding the internet with tweets, the account went silent in mid-October. A month later, on Nov. 17, a social media user named Art Candee shared what she called "heartbreaking" news.
Candee's post has been liked more than 23,000 times and generated more than 860,000 views, according to X's metrics. The post set off a string of replies and quote-tweets from people mourning the loss of one of liberal Twitter's favorite characters.This is heartbreaking.@TheRealThelmaJ1 has passed away.
— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) November 17, 2024
Thelma was one of my favorite accounts and I will miss her terribly.
🥺 pic.twitter.com/NoyA9IoT21
There's one problem, though — neither Candee nor anyone else has posted any proof that anyone has died of anything. Nobody cites a date or cause of death or shares any specifics.
And while many users credulously bought the story — which may be true, who knows — some had questions. One user expressed her skepticism, posting screenshots of other tweets from users claiming to know the details. But all those users cited were memories of a post from Thelma Johnson's account from one of her "sons" sharing the news of her death.
I’m still not 100%. I’m getting different messages about it so I don’t know what to think pic.twitter.com/Nf9roIZYVO
— Kaylan_TX (@Kaylan_TX_) November 17, 2024
But that tweet, if it ever existed, is no longer on the Thelma Johnson account page. And nobody who supposedly saw it can produce a screenshot, the authenticity of which would be difficult to verify anyway. In the information vacuum, one user shared an obituary of a different Thelma Johnson, seemingly forgetting that the name on the account doesn't correspond to a real person.
Since it apparently bears repeating, Thelma Johnson is not the real name of the person behind the account. The profile picture is either a stock photo — it has appeared on a variety of websites — or depicts an Ohio woman who died in 2018.
It's unclear if the person running the account is really a grandmother (or MeeMaw as the account's bio states), though that person did mention having grandchildren in a June interview with Cathy Sigmon of Civic Engagement Beyond Voting. For a supposed senior citizen, though, they have a notably dextrous hand with Photoshop and generative AI.
What is clear is that the account stopped posting on Oct. 18 and has not returned. New Times sent the account a direct message, through which we have corresponded before, but has not heard back. The account's last post alerted users that Elon Musk's X would be using the site's posts to train AI models, so it's possible that action prompted the account to go dark. If that's the case, there's little evidence that a Thelma Johnson account has popped up on Bluesky, the hot new destination for liberals fleeing X.
Really, nobody knows anything — not who runs the account, whether that person alive or why they've bid an Irish goodbye to the internet. The person behind the account may have actually died, which indeed would be unfortunate. But to this point, not a single person has proffered anything verifiable to show that's in fact the case.
So, until someone shares some real information, hyper-online #Resistance tweeters might want to remember one important thing: Though it often doesn't feel like it, there's a wide gulf between "stopped tweeting" and "dead."
