impersonate no more!

From what I understand from Simon Owens' article 'How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility', it is said that many credible people like the Dalai Lama, being such a nice human being, some impersonator opened up a twitter account and impersonate Dalai Lama. Now the question here is, is it ethical to impersonate someone that you're not?

No it is not ethical, in fact it is violating the Twitter's Terms of Service.  and also it also makes us Twitter users very hard to differentiate or we will no longer believe who is real and who is fake. It also ruins the credibility of the celebrity. 


To help solve this problem, Twitter's Co-founder Biz Stone said: "In the end, though, he encouraged celebrities to not only join the micro-blogging service, but to run their accounts themselves." 


This will not only reduce the numbers of impersonators on Twitter and also celebrities could use Twitter as a tool to communicate directly with their fans. It is very hard for Twitter to tackle this problem. According to Simon Owens (2009) he said, "Because there are thousands of new users signing up every day, it's virtually impossible for Twitter's relatively small staff to monitor accounts for imposters. Instead, they often have to rely on the person being misrepresented contacting the company."


This is why i think it is a very good idea for Twitter to introduce a news system which verifies celebrities as real celebrities and not impostors. With this new system, it is also easier for me to find and follow my favourite celebrities without worrying whether he or she is a fake.

Verified account symbol

References: 


Owens, S. 2009, "How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility", [Online] PBS.org, viewed 14 November 2010, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/02/how-celebrity-imposters-hurt-twitters-credibility051.html>