Oh boy. Here we go.

As the curator of several “fake celebrity” twitter accounts, this crap is a little scary.

Celebs freaking out about this has happened before, but I’m pretty sure that LaRussa is the first to actually take legal action - though I could be, and probably am, wrong.

Here is the email I got when one of my fake accounts came to the attention of Twitter:

Hi There,

We’ve received a complaint from a fellow Twitterer. It has come to our attention that your Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/a************r

is in violation of our basic Terms of Service, specifically article 4 which mentions impersonation:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.

In this case “impersonation” is the issue. Impersonation is against our terms of service unless it’s parody. The standard for defining parody is, “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke.”

To settle this issue we’ve changed the user name in the full name and username fields in order to eliminate confusion. You can change your real and user names to something else if you’d like:

1. Visit Twitter.com/settings
2. Edit the Full Name and Username fields
3. Click “Save”

but please honor Twitter’s Terms of Service accordingly. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

Thanks,

Twitter Support

Clearly, their terms are very grey.  I wasn’t impersonating another Twitter user, per se, and I certainly wasn’t harassing, threatening, or intimidating anyone.  Most importantly though is their use of this wording for the definition of parody: “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke.”

How the hell am I supposed to know what a reasonable person is?  Are you a reasonable person?  Am I?  Every time I tweeted as this person, I was always very careful to make sure I wasn’t slandering his name while at the same time pushing the asinine level right up to the line, but never crossing it.

I knew that eventually my celeb would find out and would want to take over the account and I was fully prepared to willingly hand it over with no fight whatsoever. However, Twitter simply accused me of a ToS violation, changed my account name (but didn’t delete it), and didn’t let me argue my side of the story.  I have a hard time believing that Twitter would come down that heavy-handed on any account if the violation wasn’t reported by a celebrity (or someone in their organization).