It Can Be OK for Someone to Impersonate You on Twitter

So long as someone else isn’t making money on your name or defaming other people, it can be OK for them to impersonate you on Twitter.

The recent revelation that a faker had been impersonating Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy on Twitter prompted a flurry of mostly amused discussion in literary and cyber circles. But it’s also raised questions about the legality of such pretenses.

Michael Crossan, an unpublished writer, created a fake Twitter account, @CormacCMcCarthy.com, which attracted 6,000 followers, including novelist Margaret Atwood, before the jig was up in late January when Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey became suspicious and could not verify the veracity of the account.

Crossan subsequently apologized and claimed his masquerade was only a whimsical lark that allowed him an opportunity to mimic McCarthy’s writing style with such wacky Tweets as, “Already finger waggers spit envy and spite and doubt. On a beautiful day this stranger was just saying hello.”

Crossan inflicted little, if any, harm on the notoriously reclusive 78-year-old McCarthy (who reportedly doesn’t own a computer) or anyone else. But what legal risks might he — or any Twitter impersonator — encounter if he had decided to take things a bit further?

The answer, says Scottsdale, Ariz. Internet lawyer Aaron M. Kelly, is that impersonating someone on Twitter is not illegal. However, he says, “If someone sets up a Twitter account under an assumed name and then uses the account for financial gain… then yes, there are definitely legal grounds to sue. Also, if this same person uses their faux Twitter account to, say, defame someone and it causes a legal fracas, the person Tweeting under the assumed name could definitely find themselves in some legal hot water.”

Kelly also points out that there are big differences between the standards for celebrities and for ordinary people.

Aaron M. Kelly

“If you’re famous, you’re expected to have tougher skin because you’re going to be scrutinized more,” he says. “Celebrities have more rights in some respects, but they also lose certain rights. They have the right to prohibit people from profiting from their name; but since they’re in the public eye, they may lose their right to publicity as far as how people are using their name.”

It’s probably not surprising that Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder and CEO, came in for a fair share of cyber impersonation on blogs and Twitter feeds and Kelly says most people took it as parody entertainment. “The question is: When do they cross the line? If they cross the line into promoting a product or somehow capitalizing on the impersonation, then there are going to be definite legal risks.”

In the non-celebrity world, it’s become common for people to fake identities to gain advantage over competitors, Kelly says. He has one current case involving a Craigslist poster who faked being his client and who posted messages suggesting that the client’s flooring company did shoddy work. Kelly got the defendant’s Internet Protocol (IP) address from Craiglist. An IP address is a unique number assigned to every computer that accesses the Internet. Kelly was able to trace down the source of the posts through the IP address and learned that it was from one of his client’s competitors.

He also notes that because the posts appeared on a California Craigslist site, he used the state’s new “E-personation” statute as a tool to end the posts. California became the first state January 2011 to enact a law making cyber impersonation “for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person” a criminal misdemeanor offense. While there is some debate in legal circles about the necessity of such statutes, they may also reflect a shift in thinking among lawmakers and Internet companies that identity requirements need to be tightened.

According to Kelly, both Google and Facebook are “pushing hard to make it so everyone must use their government name when signing up for accounts. “Look where we are today,” he says. “Google just announced major moves to combine all their ‘features’ under one policy; and with Facebook’s IPO, well, let’s just say that one of their primary currencies right now is a whole lot of data about a whole lot of people. Data is currency these days and the best way that will pay is if we’re all really who we say we are online. So, expect to see a push for—as Steven Colbert would say—‘truthiness’ from the big Web companies over the next several years.”

If you find that someone is impersonating you online, consulting an attorney versed in Internet law can help you determine if the activity is relatively innocent or if you have grounds for a lawsuit.