Last week, I noticed that Twitter user @merlinacleve had copied several of my Tweets as if they were her own (including one about my most recently published short story) and copied my Twitter profile as hers. That profile reads:
Writer of dark fiction. Member of HWA & SFWA. Assistant Editor of Electric Velocipede - @EV_Mag. Represented by Mark McVeigh of The McVeigh Agency.
She made one change, with her location. I live in Maryland; her profile states Texas. I know for a fact that she is not represented by my literary agent, nor does she work for Electric Velocipede. My guess is she's not a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) or the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) either. And for her avatar, she is using a picture of a woman with similar coloring to mine, which is just flat out creepy.
I reported this to Twitter and after several emails back and forth in which I provided documentation of the tweets and the profile intel, I received this response today:
Hello,
Thank you for your report. We've contacted this user and asked them to review their behavior regarding posting content without proper attribution. Please allow 48 hours for their receipt and review of our email.
If you continue to notice violating behavior on this account, please feel free to file a ticket to prompt additional review. We'll need direct links to both the original posted tweet and the tweet posted without attribution by the reported user.
I am so angry I could spit. (Except that's gross, so I won't.) I earned every one of those credentials. Every one. Twitter is basically saying, "Oh well, we've told her to stop." Sorry, that is not enough of a resolution in my book. I've responded to them stating as such.
Look, I know that in the grand literary world, I'm no one, but I don't use a pen name. Ever. My name is mine. My accomplishments are mine. I will state here and now for the record:
Merlina Cleveland is not me. That is not my pen name or my alter ego or me when I wake up on the wrong side of the bed. That is someone pretending to be me on Twitter, and Twitter won't do a thing about it.
That, Twitter, is a big, huge fail.
I'm quite certain if she were pretending to be Stephen King, Twitter would rectify the situation in a heartbeat.
Monday, November 7, 2011
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4 comments:
I don't know what good it will do, but I've tweeted the issue to the few followers I have and reported your doppelganger as SPAM, so hopefully enough people will do likewise that Twitter will pull her profile.
Thank you very much, Josin.
Wow, that really sucks. I hope things get resolved soon. How did you find out about this?
Thank you, Anthony. I found out about it by blind luck. I wanted to RT something I'd seen and pulled up Tweets that contained DailySF. I saw the imposter's Tweet about my story, pulled up her profile and scanned her Tweets, and my jaw dropped.
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