Tyler Tech: For famous Tweeters, faux is in fashion

I’m a fan of fake things, it turns out.

Fake meat, like that in veggie burgers, is delicious.Fake religions, like Pasta-farianism, are hilarious.

The fake thing catching my eye these days? Fake Twitter profiles.

In the last couple of weeks, a Twitter profile called FakeAPStylebook started making waves on Twitter.

The real Associated Press does have a Twitter profile for its stylebook (which our writers and editors consult), but I would argue that the fake one is far more useful.

One piece of sage advice for budding journalists? “If you cannot find the source of a quote, make one up. Nobody’s reading your story anyway. Get over yourself.”

Another rings a little truer to this writer: “While it’s tempting to call them ‘baristi’ because of the Italian roots, the plural of ‘barista’ is ‘journalism majors.’”

Fakery is a growing trend on Twitter. FakeSheilaDixon makes posts attributed to the Baltimore mayor, who, if you believe the fake profile, lives in “Sheilaville, Maryland.”

Sheilaville is really a different world. In the wake of the “Flamingo-gate” scandal, when the city threatened to hand Hampden mainstay Cafe Hon an $800 bill for the giant pink flamingo adorning their fire escape, she tweeted, “If anyone is looking for the Cafe Hon flamingo, it is now decorating my lawn at home.”

The profile makes very specific references to real people who actually work in the mayor’s office. Maybe it could be the mayor herself. It’d be the perfect cover. Just say you’re not you and the Internet has no choice but to believe you.

Other famous Baltimoreans also have fake Twitter dopplegangers, including Peter Angelos, Steve Bisciotti, Bob Ehrlich and Martin O’Malley.

It isn’t just disgruntled journalists or cheeky Marylanders. An account for a CWalken hailing from New York was disavowed by its namesake, actor Christopher Walken, who does not have a Twitter account.

Frequent readers of this column may remember me saying the jury was out on this account. Yeah, it’s fake. Or, rather, it was. Twitter nuked it in March.

Comedian Stephen Colbert had an evil tweeting twin for some time, as well, under the name StephenColbert (Colbert tweets as StephenAtHome).

The fake account, started in 2007, is still up. But unlike Walken, who publicly disavowed it, the real Colbert instead chooses to be funnier and more active than his fake.

“Wearing a mask is so sweaty,” he wrote Saturday night. “I don’t know how those scooby-doo villians [sic] did it.”

Some celebs, including “rapper” 50 Cent, “singer” Britney Spears and President Barack Obama, actually have paid people to tweet for them.

Presumably, these people aren’t anywhere near as entertaining as the real fakes. But by paying somebody to really fake their tweets, they’re really showing how really fake they really are.

Confused yet? I know I am.

The official Twitter solution to the problem is account verification. If you see a friendly checkmark on somebody’s profile, it means they are who they say they are.

At the moment, this program is targeted at A-listers and media people. But since the program is limited and celebrity is relative, sometimes the only way to guess if somebody is real on Twitter is to flip a coin.

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