@ebazelon: Why Are You Impersonating Me on Twitter?

Kanye West, Ewan McGregor, Maya Angelou, Tony La Russa, Ben Stiller, and me. Not a list I’d normally find myself on. But like all [2] of [3] these [4] real [5] celebrities [6], I have my own Twitter impersonator.

At first this was creepy. Would the person who wanted to be me online show up at my door next, in real-life stalker fashion? Or was the point of creating a fake me to harm the real me, by posting trouble-making lies in my voice?

But when I found my impersonator, and decided that his weird form of flattery was unwelcome but benign, I started to understand the whole phenomenon of Twitter. The reason the site is so popular is the same reason it breeds numerous imposters. Twitter isn’t really intimate. It’s intimacy wrapped in a jokey veneer (my avatar is a cheeseburger! a goat!) and an endless loop of instant feedback. That makes it the perfect place to pretend to be someone else.

Like many people in my late-30s age group, I’m not an early adapter. A year after signing up, I still have a desultory relationship with Facebook. I’d been waiting to see whether I could safely ignore Twitter [7] without feeling lame and old, or whether I’d have to sign up because, after all, I do work for a web magazine. Then a couple of months ago, my colleague John Dickerson mentioned a story about Michelle Obama that, he said, I’d Twittered about. I was surprised, because I wasn’t Twittering. After John insisted that he was sure he’d read a Twitter post with my name on it, I typed my name into the site’s search engine. A page for “ebazelon” popped up. Here’s a partial version of it. Ebazelon styled herself a “contributing editor at Slate,” based in New Haven, Conn. Which is where I live. The avatar was a drawing of a girl on ice skates. I started reading the posts and felt my face get hot.

They weren’t slanderous or dreadful. They were banal. “Yes, Demeter! The Greek Goddess of the earth and motherhood.” Huh? “If I listened to the radio, I would try to tune in the radio station that plays this song: Walking on a Dream, by Empire of the Sun.” I would? No, I surely would not. And this one, oh how dreadfully smug, “Awaiting the following of the masses after today's podcast!! :)” Whoever had written that was really trying to get inside my head, imagining what I’d be thinking about after taping the weekly Slate Political Gabfest [8]. And after listening to the show, this was what my imposter thought I would be like—an egomanic? Who used emoticons?

Twitter’s impersonation policy [9] is clear and firm: “Pretending to be another person or business as entertainment or in order to deceive is impersonation.” Parodies are allowed, but the “profile information on a parody account must make it obvious that the profile is fake.” I followed the site’s instructions for reporting an impersonator. I also signed up on Twitter as “Emily Bazelon.” I was still not keen to tweet, but I felt like I had to take defensive measures. Over the next few days, I checked my e-mail, waiting for the reassuring message from Twitter that would tell me that ebazelon was gone. None appeared. Instead, my doppelganger’s list of followers continued to grow, to more than 200.

I know that’s a gnat-like number in our elephant of a world. I also know that I should have felt flattered by the imitation, because everyone kept telling me so. But I didn’t. I felt agitated—200 people, including one of my own dearly beloved co-workers, thought that I would really rave about the goddess Demeter and my own made-up popularity? I also felt a sense of foreboding. Memories of a friend’s experience with a real-life stalker started needling at me. They were unhappy memories, involving a restraining order.

The lawyers for the Washington Post Company wrote a stern note asking for immediate removal of ebazelon’s account. But a day or two later, ebazelon was still tweeting away. So I fired more shots. I asked John, Slate’s Twitter extraordinaire who now has more than 650,000 followers, to tell his troops where to find the real Twitter version of me [10]. And then I took a deep breath, figuratively and literally too, and posted my first Twitter update: “Well turns out the way to make me twitter is to get an impersonator to prod me.”

That seemed to do it. Ebazelon was soon no more. The only trace left was a suspended account with a generic note from Twitter telling visitors to “mosey along now [11].” I felt better. But I was still getting a trickle of e-mail from readers and Gabfest listeners asking which me on Twitter was real. So on an April edition of the Gabfest [12] (near the end), I cleared things up. And David Plotz, my Gabfest co-conspirator along with John, put out an inspired call for the Twitter doppelganger to write in: “We’d love to hear from you,” he said.

A month later, I did:

Hello Emily,

Just a quick a note to clear my conscience. I was your twitter impersonator.

I would have confessed earlier but the thoughts of the WP legal were petrifying. Now I offer my remorse and regret. Be assured that I am merely a grad student from Ireland with absolutely no bad intentions, (unless you count usurping J. Dickerson as Slate's twitter king). … I felt yours was a persona that was sorely lacking on twitter and moonlighting as ebazelon merely accounts for my misspent library breaks! … Causing distress, or paranoia, was the last thing that I would ever want to come from this and I was devastated and ashamed when I heard you talking about your feelings towards it on the gabfest.

… I can only hope you forgive me and acknowledge my sincerity.

With deepest regrets,

M.

P.S... and if you ever come to Ireland, I'll buy you a pint

The note was a relief and also a puzzle. It didn’t read stalker. It was sweet and sheepish. Had I been too mean? When my impersonator was an anonymous Internet presence, he’d been threatening, and I’d wanted only to ward him off. Now he was a person. Offering to buy me a drink. Who was this guy?

M. has a lovely Irish name that he has begged me not to publish. He is 22, and he is getting a master’s in international relations in Dublin. I asked for his number. When I called, his voice had an endearing lilt. He hadn’t heard directly from Twitter about the Washington Post lawyers, but when I’d talked about them on the Gabfest, he’d gotten spooked. It was a funny conversation, like talking to someone who has a crush on you except you’re the one who wants something. What I wanted, of course, was to understand why he’d done it. You sound so normal, I said. What could you possibly have been thinking?

We batted this around for a while, and the best answer M. came up with was, “When I signed up for Twitter I typed in names, and I found everyone I wanted, except for you. So I decided to fill what for me was a gap. It was weirdly emulous rather than impersonation. What I really wanted to know was, would people follow? Was I right that there was a demand out there? And there was.” M. talked about all of ebazelon’s followers with a note of triumph. I asked him if he’d expected to get caught. He said yes. “When you look for Barack Obama or the Pretenders, there are three or four twitterers, and you try to figure out which one is real, and some of the fake ones are funny. I was being fake Emily.”

Fake me on Twitter, when there was no real me, and when I’m not a celebrity so no one would know it was fake? I was getting vertigo again. But it was M.’s turn to ask a question: Why did I sic the Washington Post lawyers on him, rather than just ask him nicely to stop? Now that we were chatting away, this seemed like a reasonable question. But, I reminded myself, and then M., I hadn’t known who he was. Why should I have assumed that hiding behind the cloak of Internet anonymity was a gentle fan rather than a menace? M. allowed that made sense. “I guess this is something you do if you have too much time on your hands,” he said. “Like right now I should be working on my master’s thesis.”

Later, after I asked, M. sent me the old ebazelon posts, with this note:

Hi Emily
Was very nervous talking to you.
I hope you feel a little better about the whole affair now.
Below is a link to the posts. Remember, the more mundane, the more authentic!

I was now entirely disarmed, ready even to forgive the emoticon. Also, curious to learn more about M.—maybe as curious as he’d apparently been about me. So I friended him on Facebook. Now I know that he is just back from a trip to Bermuda, where he went to see a waterfall with his silky blond-haired girlfriend, who called it paradise. Also that he was dubious when Ireland beat Bangladesh in cricket, livid when his PlayStation3 broke, and likes Hot Chip’s and Peter Gabriel’s cover of Vampire Weekend.

This isn’t the usual ending to an impersonator story. That would be a cease-and-desist letter. Or from Tony La Russa, a lawsuit for reputational damage and emotional distress. Kanye West expressed his outrage with his caps key, “THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON'T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS.”

I prefer a different spin. When a contributor to the blog Eat Me Daily started a fake Twitter account for the reviewer Restaurant Girl, she tried to slap it down.* But a rash of other fake Twitter foodies followed, which led Eat Me Daily to ask [13], “What have we learned from this? The internet is so much funnier when it's fake.” The Twitter medium, in particular, is posing as stream of consciousness, a direct line into our real thoughts. But hardcore Twitter users understand that it’s not that at all. It’s a narrative construct, just like a first-person novel or memoir, with its own set of rules. It’s authentic if it seems authentic, not if it’s actually real. Of course my impersonator would turn out to be not an obsessive stalker, but a curious, diffident grad student engaged in an intellectual experiment

This is what social networking is supposed to be but rarely is, right? A haltingly warm one-on-one encounter between two people who would never have otherwise met. Twitter is the land of a million two-way streets. Now I follow my impersonator on it. And that, too, is a function of the new media map we’re just beginning to navigate.

Illustration by Jenny Livengood.

*Correction June 25th: The original sentence wrongly said that Restaurant Girl slapped down the Twitter account impersonating her. In fact she tried to slap it down but the site is still up.