The Foreign Ministry and the State Council Information Office, the government agency that regulates the Internet in China, did not immediately respond to interview requests on Monday.

The use of fake Twitter accounts would also appear to dovetail with China’s increasingly sophisticated effort to present the country in a more flattering light while trying to bring the world around to its point of view on thorny issues, among them the continuing territorial dispute with Japan and widespread perception in the West that China restricts religious freedom and represses ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs.

In recent years, the government has sprinkled hundreds of college campuses across the globe with Confucius Institutes and financed overseas newscasts of the national broadcaster CCTV in a half-dozen languages. In the most recent soft power push, state-owned film companies have formed a partnership with Hollywood to produce blockbusters like “Transformers: Age of Extinction” that feature Chinese actors.

But when it comes to leveraging Western social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — all of which are blocked here — Beijing’s efforts would appear to be a bit ham-handed. On Twitter, many of the fake accounts identified by Free Tibet use stock images or headshots found on the sites of commercial photographers in the United States. Others employ the likenesses of actors like Erica Durance, who played Lois Lane in the television series “Smallville,” or in one case, Syd Barrett, the lead vocalist of Pink Floyd, who died in 2006. Oddly, many of the Twitter handles, like Oliver Nina, Felix James and Philomena Rebecca, appear to be created through the combination of two first names. Nearly all the profile images are those of Caucasians.

Kirsten Kowalski, a photographer from suburban Atlanta, was dismayed to learn that a portrait she had taken of a high school student ended up as Lydia May, a woman who, judging from her tweets, was peeved by the Dalai Lama’s visit to the United States this year but also thrilled to share with her followers an article titled “Xinjiang eyes housing, education for poverty mitigation.”