“Satire on its own can’t get bad actors to act better, but it can attract attention and direct people to those actors and their actions,” Leroy wrote in a message on Saturday, one of many e-mail correspondences Leroy has had with journalists. “A lot of people, especially early on, sent me angry messages thinking the account was legit. I like to imagine that moment when they realized it was a joke, and they had to think about what the account actually was and why it existed.”

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Knowing who’s who on Twitter has been a challenge since the beginning: the basketball great Shaquille O’Neal created his own Twitter feed, with the insistent handle The_Real_Shaq, after someone was pretending to be him. The impersonations had become so problematic that Twitter created “verified accounts” last year assuring followers that the person controlling the account was the real deal.

BP_America is one of those verified Twitter accounts, and perhaps for that reason  that, and BPGlobalPR’s over-the-top sense of humor  there should be little genuine confusion between the two among Twitter users. Thus far, BP has not filed a complaint against BPGlobalPR.

A Twitter spokeswoman wrote via e-mail that the company favored an “open exchange of information and ideas between individuals, organizations, corporations and government leaders,” including parody, for which it suggests guidelines. (These can seem a bit humorless, however, like including a note saying, “This is a parody.”) “If a brand or organization feels they are being impersonated or that a parody account does not fall within our guidelines,” she wrote, “we respond to impersonation requests within 24 hours.”

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While satire has always been with us, certainly longer than public relations executives have been, the Internet is democratizing the process, said Miriam Meckel, a professor of communications in Switzerland who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard studying the impact of Twitter and social media services on journalism.

“What the Internet does is that it provides lots of ways for ordinary people to challenge big brands,” Ms. Meckel said. “You can just put up a Twitter stream and talk about BP brand. If you do it well and in a witty way, you can have 100,000 followers.”