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Fake reporter makes up Adrian Wojnarowski story
There's a long history of ridiculous social media behavior on many fronts, but one of the most annoying and persistent varieties has been from people who create accounts seemingly from reporters (who don't actually exist), tweet false news, and have that go viral. In the world we live in, actual news does sometimes come from reporters previously not known nationally, and the person or people behind these fake accounts has/have figured out how to make them look reasonable enough that many people will unquestionably spread fake news from them. The latest case of social media misinformation comes from "@ScottHughesCBB" on X, with a claim that former ESPN/Yahoo reporter Adrian Wojnarowski, now the GM of the St. Bonaventure Bonnies, was ejected from their Field of 68 Opening Day Marathon tournament game Monday:
In its first two hours up, that post received more than 650 retweets and more than 4,100 likes. (It eventually got Community Noted after that, but not for the first two hours.) And yes, some of those interactions were people pointing out that it was fake, with some even getting comment from the St. Bonaventure athletic department to that extent:
But many still spread this around like it was an actual story. And the "Hughes" account did make itself look moderately legitimate on the surface: the bio of "Credentialed men’s college basketball reporter. SUNY Cortland class of ‘09. Husband, father" only stands out from many actual reporters' bios in lacking an outlet, and most of the account's tweets are banal sports observations that wouldn't seem out of place on an actual reporter's feed. Mixed in with those, though, are fake news posts of varying quality.
To start with, this account's oldest existing post (they may have deleted some others) is a Nov. 8, 2024 "report" on the players involved in a fight on Auburn's basketball plane. Yes, that fight happened, but it was between two much less notable reserves. (This post and others helped launch an inaccurate Reddit thread on the matter, though.) Beyond that, there was a "report" last week seemingly not buttressed elsewhere that the 2026-27 SEC/ACC Challenge" is in danger of not being held...due to a TV contract dispute," but that one didn't take off. The Woj one did, though, and part of what might have helped here was a claim that "Hughes" was on site in South Carolina for this event:
However, a Google Lens search (a great way to find where these accounts get their images from) shows that this was stolen from one of Jeff Goodman's posts Saturday:
This is just the latest in a long history of fake account sports "news," which has been particularly prominent in college sports. That's ranged from "Richard G. West" tweets about Jordan Burns missing a flight and taking a cross-state Uber to a game (which fooled local CBS stations and Burns' own mom) and students queueing Thursday morning for a College GameDay Saturday show at Tennessee to a "Simon Charles NFL" claim on Ed Cooley's interest in the Virginia job, leading to Cooley quoting MLK in an interview in an attempt to refute the claim.
Given the way X now rewards engagement, these accounts and others have become even more prominent lately. But a difference with accounts like "Ballsack Sports" and "NBA Centel" is that the names alone reveal those ones are fake, making it much stranger when the likes of ESPN get repeatedly fooled (which the creator of "Ballsack Sports" has claimed is a good bit of the point). That's also somewhat the case with those impersonating actual national reporters with slightly-altered names, but that's lame in other ways. However, these fake local reporters are the worst version of this; they're easy enough to disprove with a little investigation, but not everyone who reposts or reads a repost will do that, leading to some actually believing these claims (whereas a "Ballsack Sports" thing is obviously fake). And none of this reaches the level of actually-funny satire like The Onion, which is looking to make people laugh rather than actually fool them.
What the fake reporter accounts are actually doing is contributing to the worsening of social media, impugning the reputations of their subjects, and wasting a lot of people's time in the process. And that's another difference from actually-funny satire: for example, an Onion story such as "NBA Reaffirms Commitment To Gamblers Only Ruining Their Lives Legally" not only makes people laugh and think about the ongoing gambling scandal there, it doesn't make anyone think commissioner Adam Silver actually said "When it comes to gambling, the NBA wants to ensure basketball fans are only blowing up their lives and those of their loved ones through the proper, lawful channels," and it doesn't require an attempt to get a NBA comment.
By contrast, with posts like the fake Wojnarowski one here and the other past ones mentioned above, the misinformation looks credible enough that some may believe it. And that's led to officials having to rebut it (which carries its own Streisand effect problem). It all adds up to wastes of time, energy, and social media bandwidth. And it's just one more example of how far downhill social media discussion on sports has gone, especially on X.
