If it seems like the DDOT director’s account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter has gotten extra spicy recently, there’s a good reason: It’s an impostor.

As entertaining as it might be to think of newly anointed Acting Director Sharon Kershbaum posting AI-generated renderings of a double-decker highway over Connecticut Avenue NW, an anonymous trickster has actually been running @DDOTDCDirector for the past six months or so. The account is far from the most popular in D.C.’s corner of the internet, at just over 600 followers, but it’s clearly getting some notice. Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White started commenting on its posts back in December, apparently believing that it was indeed the head of one of his least favorite city agencies; and DDOT itself used its main account to condemn the troll account shortly after it started posting in October. @DDOTDCDirector has only grown in popularity among the city’s urbanist set since then. Fake press releases poking fun at Mayor Muriel Bowser’s recent retreat from some traffic safety measures have garnered plenty of attention. 

So Loose Lips sought to find out how, exactly, an interloper managed to disrupt the administration’s otherwise carefully curated social media presence. Turns out this state of affairs is as much a result of sloppiness at DDOT as it is the very silly policies instituted at X under new overlord Elon Musk.

The person running the account, who insisted on anonymity to discuss their online mischief-making, tells LL that they never thought they could get away with this for so long. They followed the account back when then-DDOT Director Everett Lott still ran it. But Lott deactivated the account when he was pushed out the door last fall, and this trickster logged on to see if anyone else at DDOT claimed the handle in his absence.

Lo and behold, @DDOTDCDirector was still up for grabs, so they quickly began posting as if they were actually running the agency, poking fun at Bowser’s administration all along the way. “Congrats to my new boss!” Fake DDOT Director posted on Oct. 13, when Bowser announced that Keith Anderson would be taking over as her new deputy mayor for operations and infrastructure, which oversees DDOT. Bowser has shuffled Anderson around a variety of city agencies over her three terms in office, turning to him as her interim deputy mayor for planning and economic development in the wake of John Falcicchio’s scandal-driven resignation. He’s become known as an unremarkable if steady bureaucrat in Bowser’s orbit. “​​Glad he landed in this role as a part of the recurring game of musical chairs in the Mayor’s cabinet,” the post continued. “Keep up the good work!”

This seems to have been the final straw for higher-ups at DDOT. The next day, the agency huffily informed its more than 49,000 followers that the account “is not and does not represent the District Department of Transportation in any shape or form.”

“This account is fake and is not affiliated with DDOT and our logo should not be portrayed in the profile,” the agency wrote. “This account has been reported and asked for removal.”

After DDOT’s post, the account’s new owner says, “the Streisand effect really took hold.” The agency only managed to draw more attention to the account, earning it hundreds of new followers. 

“I thought I might make like one or two jokes, and then maybe one or two people would see it,” the account’s owner says. “If I were to put myself in their shoes, I understand why they would be concerned about it. But they should’ve just reported the account, they shouldn’t have drawn this attention to it.”

After DDOT blew the whistle, the person running the account says the geniuses running the new Twitter (now X) reached out with a simple solution to keep the account from being banned: Just throw the word “parody” into the bio, and they would be allowed to keep the impersonation going.

“There’s a lot of problems with Twitter as it is now, but this may be one of the humorous, mild positives,” Fake DDOT Director says.

The anonymous account owner adds that DDOT hasn’t contacted them since this dustup. An agency spokesperson didn’t return LL’s request for comment for this story, which is understandable. 

That means the account has been allowed to just keep trolling with impunity to consistently amusing results. LL is quite partial to posts like the one pretending that Bowser appointed former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans as DDOT’s new director shortly after LL revealed that he’d begun returning to prominence in the wake of his various scandals. 

“No one understands DC’s transportation needs better than Jack and that’s why we paid him $50,000 a year when he was on Council and WMATA’s board … and definitely for no other reasons,” reads a fake quote from Rusty Lindner, in a jab at the revelation that the Colonial Parking boss hired Evans as a consultant on the sly several years ago. A similar post claiming that Bowser had hired notorious gadfly Nick DelleDonne as D.C.’s new “bike lane czar” was a bit derivative, but no less entertaining. 

But it is difficult to top the account’s interaction with White for its pure absurdity. When the councilmember, who has been railing against bike lanes for years now, posted on Dec. 17 that “DDOT is destroying the fabric of DC streets” with such safety measures and lamented the frequent turnover in the agency’s leadership, the fake account replied that “DDOT is so big that unfortunately sometimes rogue staff mistakenly worry about things like traffic safety or bus riders when designing our roads.”

“Don’t worry, we will correct their mistakes!” Fake DDOT Director added. The sarcasm here seems to have flown over White’s head. 

“I will believe it when I see,” he replied. “We just had a whole debate over MLK ave being horrible condition yet again going into another street. @DDOTDC has an agenda with no real community input going full steam ahead without listening to those in the communities we serve.”

So Fake DDOT Director just kept playing along. “I wholeheartedly understand Councilmember and I am working tirelessly to change @DDOTDC,” they responded, attaching a photo of a massive, double-decker (and traffic-clogged) highway. “Regarding MLK Ave, we received your personal design suggestion from your team and are working to divert money from the bike lane budget to make it happen.” Lots of people in the replies informed White that he’d been duped, but he hasn’t removed his posts all these months later. 

Maybe White was being a bit gullible here, but half the reason he was fooled to begin with is because the agency has seriously reversed course on many traffic safety efforts even as deaths remain persistently high. The account may be ridiculous, but with Bowser axing bike lane projects, criticizing congestion pricing, and shuttering her beloved Circulator, is fiction mimicking reality or is it the other way around?

“I think the fact that people believe that a lot of the language in the posts is real is what’s telling here,” Fake DDOT Director says. 

The account’s handler says they’d be willing to give up the account if Bowser picks a DDOT director that “has some actual autonomy” to reverse course on some of these issues (they posted a meme making such an offer, of course). But Kershbaum’s early performance as director has not given them great confidence, particularly after Bowser gave her the distinctly unpleasant duty of revealing the controversial decision to drop the Connecticut Avenue bike lane under questioning at a Council committee hearing.

So that means @DDOTDCDirector will keep trolling for the foreseeable future, hoping for a day when the agency can start living up to its lofty promises.

“Most of the transportation reporters in D.C. are gone, after the Post laid off theirs and DCist shut down,” Fake DDOT Director notes. “So I think it’s good to be reminding some people at DDOT that, hey, some people are still watching, there are some people who will still hold them accountable, even if it’s in a mocking way.”