“I spoke to a lovely reporter today,” wrote cwalken on his (or her) Twitter account this week. “I don’t know if she was really who she said she was but that’s fine. I secretly used an ironic tone.”

Sounds about right. But does anybody know who anybody really is anymore?

The popular cwalken Twitter feed, stocked with oddball observations that seem as if they could’ve popped out of the mouth of actor Christopher Walken, is read by more than 90,000 users. It is not, reportedly, written by Walken — though his picture is parked atop the page. Late Friday afternoon, the page appeared with a notice that the account has been “suspended due to strange activity.”

Things have gotten a little confusing for fans. Thanks to the democratizing powers of the Web and the rapid rise in popularity of Twitter, the very famous and the only slightly famous are finding themselves with virtual doppelgangers.

Already, a Web site has been launched to try and resolve such important questions of online celebrity identity. The U.K.-based Valebrity.com seeks to verify that the famous folks you’re following online really are who they say they are.

“Nobody knows who’s who on these social networking sites,” said Valebrity’s founder, Steven Livingstone. “Even the celebrities themselves are coming to us now and saying, ‘Is this one real?'”

Livingstone’s site identifies personalities like Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Seacrest on its list of real Twitter users, but for many Twitter users, authenticity may be beside the point.

A few weeks ago, a Twitter feed supposedly belonging to “30 Rock” star Tina Fey was identified as fake. At the time, the faux Fey’s feed had 50,000 readers. Today, it has more than 200,000.

Typically, social networking sites pull down fake accounts if there are complaints or if the site suspects fraud. But sometimes that can backfire: Facebook temporarily deleted actress Lindsay Lohan’s page in December, under the impression that it was bogus.

The move became news after the actress complained in a letter posted to her MySpace page.

Ronald Snider, an Alexandria, Va., lawyer who sometimes handles copyright issues, said that the matter is “uncharted territory” from a legal standpoint. “As far as whether it’s legal or not, that’s a big issue,” he said.

But Snider said he would be disinclined to pursue a case against such Internet impostors.

“People like this are assured to be judgment-proof,” he said. “They don’t have any money.”