@ebazelon: Why Are You Impersonating Me on Twitter?

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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 of these real celebrities, 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 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. 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 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.