Sports is the easiest place on earth to sell a lie. Nobody wants a rumor to be true more than a fan whose team just lost, and nobody shares faster than a reporter who thinks he’s about to be first. Put those two things together on a phone screen and you get a fake report with a head start.
The scale of the general problem is real. A Pew Research Center survey of 1,002 U.S. adults in December 2016 found that 64% said fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. That survey was about news in general, not sports, but fans aren’t a special species. If anything, we’re easier to fool, because the lie usually says exactly what we hoped to hear.
Case One: Two Veterans, One Fake Schefter
On October 31, 2017, an impostor posing as ESPN’s Adam Schefter claimed the New England Patriots were about to sign Colin Kaepernick. According to Awful Announcing, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King quote-tweeted it with a comment, and ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. was fooled too and later posted an apology. Around the Horn’s Tony Reali had also shared the report before that day’s broadcast. King deleted his tweet, then wrote “My fault. Sorry, all.”
Give King credit for the cleanup. But sit with the point for a second: these are people who do this for a living. If a lookalike handle and a juicy rumor can get past them, it will get past you at 11 p.m. with a drink in your hand.
Case Two: The Fake Woj and the Missing “O”
In July 2014, Orlando Weekly reported on a fake account called @WojoYahooNBA, an impostor of NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski, whose real handle, @WojYahooNBA, had about 655,000 followers at the time. The fake tweeted a tip that free agent Luol Deng was signing with the Los Angeles Clippers. Some established NBA writers retweeted it before Twitter shut the account down. The teenagers behind it said they did it “just for kicks” and later apologized.
The whole scam was one extra letter in a username. That’s the entire trick. The lesson isn’t that Twitter is a swamp, though it is. The lesson is that the name above a tweet is not the same as the person it claims to be.
Seven Checks Before You Hit Share
None of these require a journalism degree. They require ten seconds and a little suspicion:
- Read the handle letter by letter. Both cases above came down to a username that looked right at a glance.
- Check the real account. If an insider actually has the scoop, the insider’s own page or outlet will have it too.
- Look for the primary source. A team statement, a league transaction or a court filing beats any retelling.
- Treat unnamed sourcing like a weather forecast. Useful, sometimes right, never a guarantee.
- Check your pulse. If a story makes you want to share it this instant, that is exactly the moment to wait.
- Reverse-image-search the photo. Tools such as Google Images and TinEye will show you whether that “breaking” picture is actually five years old.
- Give it ten minutes. Real news survives a short delay. Fakes tend to collapse in it.
Why Sports Is Such Fertile Ground
Part of it is emotion: loyalty makes us credulous when a rumor flatters our side. Part of it is speed: whoever tweets first collects the credit, so the incentive is to post now and verify later. And part of it is that trade and free-agency season turns rumor into a sport of its own. Everyone is expecting a bombshell, which is exactly what makes a counterfeit one so easy to slip in.
What to Do When You Get Fooled
You will. King’s example is the right one: delete it, say so plainly, move on. “My fault. Sorry, all.” took four words. The worse habit is the quiet delete with no correction, because then everyone who saw the original keeps believing it.
Sports fans love to argue about everything except the facts, which is fine. Argue about whether a trade is good. Just make sure the trade happened first.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion (December 2016); Awful Announcing, fake Schefter tweet about Kaepernick (October 2017); Orlando Weekly, fake Wojnarowski account (July 2014).
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.