A Twitter Tweak For Cheeky

The number of feds on the micro-blogging service Twitter has exploded lately, making the medium that much more effective for finding and sharing information about all things Government 2.0.

However, newer users may not be aware of the medium's well-documented history of fake accounts, in which anonymous users pretend to "tweet" from the perspective of their favorite celeb or athlete.

So it was just a matter of time before one of the #gov20 crowd became the target of an amateur humorist. Who better than ubiquitous National Defense University scientist Mark Drapeau, known to the Twitterverse as cheeky_geeky. A sample tweet from Drapeau:

@nedrelid I'm happy to help @nooninina meet people in DC, best thing she can do now is follow #gov20 #goverati; many are here. @ them! :)

Someone, known only as "The Fake Dr. Drapeau" established an account through which they take aim at Drapeau's fondness for hashtags and taking pictures with "#hotties":

After much thinking i came up with a new term: #cheekyrati - for all those that retweet me. LIke it? #anothermadewordfromme

There are some #hotties at #polc09. Congrats to @julieg for setting this up. Ladies, Picture w/ me at the happy hour.

I spoke to Drapeau about the fake profile and he told me he's 99 percent sure he knows who is behind the account and that the two of them "run in the same circles," although they haven't discussed the fake profile. Showing an excellent sense of humor, Drapeau called the FakeCheekyGeeky account "completely brilliant."

"He knows me very well; it's sort of like a roast," Drapeau said, adding that he finds the updates hilarious but not malicious. "I just don't know why he decided to do me."

Hmm. Perhaps because of updates like this?