Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Illegal, Impostor Twitter Account Deleted

Several weeks ago I noticed a Twitter account trying to impersonate me. I would have written about it at the time, but I had just finished writing about the fake St. Louis Coffee Party account used to smear me, and the attack of several Breitbart bloggers, so I figured that if I wrote any more "I'm an oppressed middle-aged white guy" posts I'd start to sound like a tea partier. Hopefully, enough time has passed now where that is no longer the case.

First, I want to note, that unlike the parody twitter account mocking Dana Loesch (which I have nothing to do with, though I can't say the thought to do something like that had never crossed my mind), this account was an impostor account. The difference between the two is important, because no one would mistake the comments from a parody account as actually coming from another person, since it clearly is labelled "fake." On the other hand, an impostor account purports to speak on behalf of the actual person, so if that account makes obnoxious comments to someone, those comments would be attributed to the real person. Obviously, there's a lot of room for doing serious damage, and that's why impersonation is clearly illegal.

Anyway, here's a screen shot of the impersonation account:


The account was following local and national activists, so it seems to pretty clearly have had malicious intent. I contacted Twitter about it, and then deleted the offending account @adam_shriver:


Now I don't know anything about who did this, and that's going to be for people other than myself to figure out, but I will note that this account came into existence right around the time the fake Coffee Party account started tweeting bs and when the Bretibart bloggers were trying to go after me on Twitter. Whoever did it is going to have some explaining to do.

2 comments:

  1. I assume the holders of the "Twitter keys to the kingdom" can trace the originator of this fake account via ISP or something else. But that's assuming there was nothing faked up-front.

    Oh, and will Twitter notify you if and when they discover the ID thief?

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  2. Contact Twitter and find out who was the impersonator.
    Like Dana Loesch always says, "No one is anonymous on the Internet."

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