When Impersonation Goes Too Far

For months we’ve been giving out information on Twitter accounts that are associated with members of the Twilight cast. The fact is that there are plenty of fakes out there. Peter Facinelli has even talked about how that is a problem for an actor because if their fans gets sucked in and that fake account says/does something hurtful, it leads to bad PR for the star in question.

Twitter is slowly addressing this problem by certifying accounts of high profile people like actors, politicians, musicians, etc. However they can only move so fast. The reality is, if a star is a really big name, they get verified almost right away. Lesser known stars take longer. Ashley Greene’s account was verified in three days.   If Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, or Kristen Stewart had twitter accounts there’s would also receive immediate verification like that, because they have that type of A-list media pull. Also, Peter Facinelli, who is probably the most Internet savvy actor, would mention it.

So why bring this up now? Well up until now it’s been limited to fake Tweets and MySpace/Facebook posts. Now it took a step further. It seems that a fake Ashley Greene account on Facebook granted an interview to Twilight Review. We covered this interview as did a wide variety of other sites. The result: Ashley was misrepresented. Ashley’s real staff let Twilight Review know exactly what is going on and now Ashley’s legal team is pursuing action.

So, fans beware! Here are some tips to spotting fakes:

1. The account only talks about Twilight. Real actors are involved in tons of projects. They mention them all. If the only industry item they mention is Twilight, something is up.

2. The Twilightthemovie website has a listing of the actors who are on social networking sites like MySpace. Use that as a verification tool.

3. A real star’s account wouldn’t “take a side in” a casting issue, or post leaked photos. It would be career suicide.

4.  A real account wouldn’t only post photos from official PR junkets, or paparazzi photos.

5. In the end, it’s common sense, but if you get fooled, don’t feel too bad. Gil Birmingham, Kiowa Gordon, and Charlie Bewley all got fooled at one point too.

Now while we are on the subject of fake info there is what we call the ongoing saga of what we like to call “Nobody Doesn’t Like Brenna Lee” (give us a shout out if you are old enough to remember the commercial & can sing the jingle).

We got punked about a year ago with a photo and story that Brenna Lee Roth was supposedly cast as a Volturi. We fell for it for about two days and then realized that we were had and said, “Hey, whoever punked us. Well done, you got us good.” and then we printed a retraction. Then come May, we get this email from a guy claiming to be Brenna Lee’s limo driver in Italy who says he’ll give us all the inside dish on Brenna Lee being in Italy and behind the scenes info. We didn’t fall for it a second time, and told the person “nice try but don’t quit your day job”. Well now, the Brenna Lee thing is back again, and this time it’s taking away from Tinsel’s Korey’s right to be listed for her hard work on the IMDB(what we’ve been saying for awhile now, the IMDB is like Wikipedia. If you have IMDB pro, $30 a month, you can edit info.). Tinsel’s name has been removed as Emily and Brenna Lee’s inserted.

Now we have no idea if this is actually someone associated with Brenna Lee doing this  or some random person with a bizarre sense of humor. We suspect it’s a random person because it just doesn’t seem rational that Brenna Lee or her people  would take away from a fellow artist’s right to be recognized.  The fact is that this makes Brenna Lee look bad, for something she probably didn’t even do and isn’t aware of.   The whole thing is not fair to Tinsel and not fair to Brenna.