Twitter has removed the impersonating account.
Last night around 10 p.m., just before I went to bed, I received a series of tweets and emails from people I've never met before, alerting me to a Twitter account bearing my name, likeness, and a reference to my old job title, through which someone was publishing a bunch of racist nonsense:
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised: Over the past few months, I've reported on some of the nastiest parts of the internet. And yet seeing my name and my face next to that kind of speech gave me a jolt. At the same time, I knew, as a person who has become professionally familiar with internet bad behavior this was, to use a scientific term, bupkis. Other people, women in particular, have been and currently are the targets of a much more concerted, much more frightening kind of harassment from a never-ending legion of anonymous hobgoblins.
So, PO-ed but sleepy, I tweeted about the fake account, shut off my phone, and turned in. At least Deputy_Bernstein had chosen a reasonably flattering picture.
This morning, the account was still up, and I tweeted about it again. Several friends and colleagues reached out to say that they had reported Deputy_Bernstein overnight, and recommended that I file a report with Twitter. So I did! I clicked through some prompts and uploaded a copy of my driver's license, which Twitter requires to verify that I am the real Joe Bernstein.
I also tweeted at Deputy_Bernstein to quit it, and he responded "Ok". But then he didn't quit it.
That was all at about 10:30 Eastern time this morning. And Deputy_Bernstein is still at it. So, to recap, more than 12 hours after people began to report the account as a malicious fake to Twitter, and more than three hours after I uploaded a government-issued document to Twitter to verify my identity (I'm already verified in that other, less exciting way), there is still an anonymous dweeb using my identity to post racist bile.
Here's what this tells me: Twitter, which of late has made a fuss about its anti-harassment campaign, is still broken when it comes to protecting the reputation of its users. Though twelve hours of this stuff is unlikely to cause real damage to my career or reputation, it could for someone with less name recognition or a savvier troll than me. I'm an ideal case: I have a little blue check mark and everything and I can raise a stink on Twitter that people will see.
Most people can't (Unless they are Curt Schilling). Though Twitter has, cannily, avoided making specific promises about turnaround time on requests like mine, if it's taken this long for Twitter to deal with some relatively minor harassment against a person with some modest visibility and reach on the platform, how long does it take them to deal with harassment to the vast majority of people who use the service?
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.