Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah abruptly disappeared from social media last week, prompting his 25 million combined followers to speculate about what he was up to. His final message to fans before deactivating his Twitter account was a cryptic Tweet that read, “2019 Resolution: Time to get in touch, for real.”
Salah definitely wouldn’t be the first celebrity to take a break from social media. Other celebrities to recently go offline include Kanye West, Justin Bieber, and Ed Sheeran who all took a brief departure from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, for reasons that ranged from preserving their sanity to focusing on their careers or family, before making a comeback. Meanwhile, some fans suggested that Salah’s unannounced disappearance was part of some kind of campaign to raise awareness on the importance of real life communication.
However, it turns out that the Liverpool striker’s reasons to disappear from social media were none of the above. Over the weekend, DHL Express Egypt uploaded a video onto their social media platforms with the caption: “We’ve reached Mo Salah and we can connect you to him.” Less than 24-hours later, the footballer reappeared on Twitter with an image of himself opening a DHL package, revealing that his absence from the platform was no more than a marketing ploy for the company’s 50th anniversary. Mystery solved.
