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After James Harden was traded to the 76ers, rumors began to circulate about the breaking point between Irving and the 2018 league MVP. It posited that Irving beat Harden in one-on-one almost daily and that the Nets’ ballhandling wizard even once called his teammate “washed”After locking him up in a scrimshaw. The tale spread across the Internet—a Google search for “Kyrie Irving James Harden washed” last month returned just under two million results—and eventually onto the airwaves of ESPN, being referenced thrice, by two different analysts, in two different months. Yet, the incidents were never actually experienced.
Instead, the initial report was originated on Twitter from a tweet with a graphic that received over 40,000 likes. Although the initial information was attributed at a “Brooklyn Nets executive,”Its creator was @BallsackSports. The account has amassed over 170,000 followers in the ten months since its launch.
Twitter accounts are not new to conjure up stories about athletes, coaches, and teams. A quick search on Twitter reveals many accounts whose handles are variations on the names prominent sports news reporters. (Remember how @Ken_Rosenthal_ broke the story in 2014 about a trade involving David Price for the Tigers? According to Matt, an Ohioan, Ballsack Sports was founded with the intention of exposing misinformation online. It’s why when Matt was naming his account, he wanted a handle that was “as illegitimate as possible” and that wouldn’t blend in, a key difference from many other fake news sources. “I felt like I could do it under something as humorous and obscene and out there and so blatantly obvious as Ballsack Sports,”He says. “The logo itself was BS. It’s a play on bulls—.”
The account became viral for many months, despite the fact that its moniker was not clear. The crude handle was cited on FoxNews.com as well as other websites focusing on basketball. A digital community was formed and followers frequently replied to it. “You got sacked”on posts that succeed at duping. The account is being followed by current NBA players, Myles Turner and Kevin Durant. once tweeted, “Ballsack Sports is the greatest thing to happen to NBA Twitter.”Individual Ballsack Sports “reporters”—they are not officially affiliated with the founder or original account—even started appearing online, and an Instagram account with nearly 500,000 followers, @ballsacksport, adopted the brand, initially without Matt’s knowledge.
Matt deactivated his account for a month between mid-May and mid-June. He claimed that it had been an experiment that was successful, but had reached its end. Ballsack Sports returned to Matt’s account in the last ten days. He said he wanted to use it to create more often but also to make new accounts. “harmless but humorous”Graphics, but also discussions on topics that are not related to sports.
In January, 76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey went on a Philadelphia radio station, “imploring people not to get too attached to Ballsack Sports tweets and treat them seriously.” And while Morey’s plea may be apt when thinking about Ben Simmons trade rumors, the account’s existence has revealed lessons about Twitter, misinformation and the state of sports media. Damian Lillard, Trail Blazers guard once said: “I think we live in a world where a lot of morons can’t tell if something is real or fake.” Well … actually, Lillard didn’t say that. But Ballsack Sports did publish a graphic saying he did.
The most well-known Ballsack Sports graphic was conceived in a McDonald’s parking lot. Matt was inspired to riff upon traditional old-head vs. young-head talk-show debates in February. Instead of choosing a player to copy from LeBron James’ draft, Matt tried to think of a player who entered the league following LeBron. However, he had already left the NBA. Matt pulled out his smartphone and scanned the Basketball Reference List of the 2004 NBA draft class. He saw a name that he thought was a great fit while waiting in the drive-thru line. “I’m like, that’s it right there. I love Josh Smith. He was cold, he’s been retired for quite a few years now.”
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Most Ballsack graphics can be created in three to five minutes. Matt says that this particular one took him about three to five minutes. “took a couple minutes longer,”He wanted to find the perfect photo and pair it with a quote that would have the greatest reach. He ordered two Diet Cokes, parked in a spot, and began to put the graphic together. “It’s a different game back then, much more physical,”Smith was quoted in the image. “I don’t think [LeBron] has the jumpshot or skills to really consistently dominate defenses then as he does today. There’s so much spacing in today’s game. We had 2–3 guys on a star player any given night. Nothing was easy.”Matt posted it, and it took off.
This story contains an important caveat. Journalists make mistakes, myself included. And many outlets, including my own, sometimes take out of context buzzy quotes. The purpose of this piece isn’t to shame anyone. Outkick.com published an article with this headline just hours after the Smith graphic was posted on Twitter. “Former NBA player Josh Smith says LeBron James wouldn’t have been able to dominate in his era.” The article—which was later deleted—was shared, via syndicate, on FoxNews.com and posted on Fox’s Twitter feed, which has more than 20 million followers. Ballsack Sports was explicitly mentioned in the story’s copy. “That’s when I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Matt says.
Matt saw a tweet by Joel Embiid, 76ers center, in which the Philadelphia star was mentioned. voiced his frustrations with NBA Twitter. “Y’all have no idea how much this media makes up stuff for followers and shame on you for believing them,” Embiid wrote. That message was part of Matt’s impetus for creating Ballsack Sports. He wanted to create an outlet that could make information and gain an audience. “Success to me was achieving as much awareness as possible,” Matt says. He grew up reading ESPN.com stories. Sports Illustrated Bleacher Report, however, most of his sports consumption had been reduced to a headline & an image. “I feel a lot of the sports media, or media in general, has become like fast food in that sense,”He says. Matt was surprised when the Smith graphic was combined. It took Matt just minutes to create.
1993 is the year. New Yorker Cartoon of a dog seated in a desk chair, looking down towards the floor at another pooch. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,”The one at the desk says.
Online, words can be hidden in anonymity to give rise to feelings of freedom. You can also take them out of context. Leticia Bode is an associate professor at Georgetown. Her research focuses in political communication and new media. She says that social media makes it easy to blur the lines between misinformation or satire. “When you take that same exact information totally out of context,”Bode claims, “then it can easily become misinformation as soon as somebody buys into it.”She adds, “Especially,” “if they share it organically as if it is real.”
Michael Mirer, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies the changing nature of journalistic professionalism with an emphasis on sports, notes that misinformation can also spread if users adopt formatting standards—for instance, using the word ReportOr BreakingTo open a Twitter, or Sources: [INSERT OUTLET NAME]It will all come to an end. These are easily replicated practices that are why Awful Announcing Once wrote a headline for an article. “So why are there so many fake Adrian Wojnarowski Twitter accounts?”Matt mimics, to a lesser degree, the work of team social-media accounts and other outlets that often drum up graphics about NBA gossip, but his process is less detailed. “I don’t even proofread,”He says. “And sometimes I make spelling errors and stuff like that and things just have gone viral regardless.”
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You might have thought that Martians invaded New Jersey had you listened to CBS Radio on the night Oct. 30, 1938. Orson Welles and Mercury Theatre presented an adaptation from H.G. for just over an hour. It began at 8 p.m. Wells’s novel The War of the WorldsThis was an event that exposed the power of fake information. According to A. Brad Schwartz (a Princeton University Ph.D student and the author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake NewsHe wanted to entertain a national audience by telling a dramatic story in an imaginative way. Schwartz says the broadcast became a hit. “a moment where people were questioning the authenticity of what was coming to them over the airwaves in a way that they hadn’t been before.” Some listeners later wondered, in Schwartz’s words, “How will we know when news is news, or whether it’s just fiction?”
Matt wanted people asking the same question decades later, when more people visited Ballsack Sports. That’s why on March 1 he started more explicitly drawing attention to the literal components of his online graphics. Lillard shared the one he dealt with. “so many morons everyday hating on my loyalty,”Attributing the quote as a “42nd interview that never happened with Ballsack Sports.”Matt published a graphic again featuring Lillard on March 5 with the phrase “A plea for critical thinking” “Fake Quote”It’s in the middle. The top line should read, “Does a graphic mean a player actually said anything? NO! Can anyone download a pic of dame and add text? YES!”A line at the bottom read: “Look for a link, or a story before responding. Do not take any graphic at face value.”
Matt explains his goals by saying: “I really want to create a shift, in that sense, of media literacy. I was frustrated that so many people were biting and taking the bait.”
Brooklyne Gipson, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Illinois and a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, notes that content that “is emotionally provocative”Social media is where people are most likely to share their thoughts. Mirer says that audiences are “mostly just looking for things to mobilize [around].” Case in point: In November, a Ballsack Sports graphic featuring a fictitious excerpt purporting to be from Scottie Pippen’s biography in which Pippen said Jordan “ruined the game of basketball”You can find it all over the internet.
Bode, the Georgetown professor, says the misinformation concept known as data void—high demand for information on a certain topic, with little information available—also helps explain Ballsack Sports’s rise. Bode says that the rise of COVID-19 misinformation in spring 2020 was due to such a data vacuum. As minute sports newsbreaks become more common in the sports media ecosystem and as fans clamor for the smallest gossips, the lack of clear public information makes it easier for fake transactional tweets to flourish, as they did with Ballsack Sports.
Graphics tied to timely news—like the playoffs or free agency—also tend to pop. Less than 30 minutes after the 76ers’ second-round loss to the Heat in early May, Ballsack Sports displayed a picture of Harden with the quote, “I just want the best talent around me to win a championship. I’m not sure if we’re quite there.”Harden, who had taken just two shots in Game 6, was the subject of intense public discourse. He was, therefore, an ideal Ballsack Sports subject.
More than a month later, as chatter around the Lakers’ offseason swirled online, Ballsack Sports shared a photo of the team’s former coach, Frank Vogel, alongside a tagline that said Vogel thought the 2020 NBA title felt “cheap.”Morey was moved by this. to weigh in on Twitter: “Guessing someone is going to get sacked on this one.”
Innocuous misinformation is generally created from made-up statements about professional basketball. Daniel Dale is a CNN reporter and fact-checking ace. remarked on Twitter, “Thousands of people falling daily for fake athlete quotes posted by an account called ‘Ballsack Sports’ does not inspire great confidence in society’s capacity to deal with political misinformation.”Gipson, an Illinois professor, says that Ballsack Sports’ work was often viewed as real. This shows the difficulties social platforms have managing parody accounts, and what happens when misinformation is spread. Once someone hears about, they will be able to tell others. SportsCenter that a text from LeBron played a role in Tom Brady’s return to the Buccaneers (a Ballsack Sports graphic stating this did make it onto the air), it’s hard to correct the record for a mass audience. Gipson says that corrections can be made. “much more forgettable than the memory of the lie.”
Here’s a piece of news for a real graphic: Ballsack Sports is no longer a place to see only fake basketball reports. This spring Matt found himself using his account’s reach for other purposes. In the weeks before he shut it down, Matt tweeted about mental health awareness and the shooting in Buffalo that killed 10 people. He also discussed microaggressions and the difference between implicit racial bias and explicit racial prejudice.
He claims that he received online backlash after venturing into such waters. It could have been because of the content or the fact that his satirical Twitter account wasn’t sticking to sports. Matt says such responses “played a factor”In pushing him to temporarily deactivate Ballsack Sports he also added the act of creating fake sporting graphics. “where I’m least passionate about in life right now.”
“Sometimes it might be a great message, but not from a messenger people are initially going to take seriously,”He says. “I know my account was still growing, but I didn’t want to create crazier quotes, more outlandish quotes, more harmful quotes to elicit more response. It’s just not who I am.”
Matt said that he had received several offers to buy the account in the last few months. He passed because he didn’t want its potential monetization as his priority. Instead, when discussing its current existence he harkens back to what he calls Ballsack’s “purposeful trajectory”: “to rise, to have its peak where awareness was being spread; captivating mainstream media; getting attention from journalists everywhere; and then phasing out as it was no longer needed.”
When explaining why he brought it back after a monthlong hiatus, Matt says he didn’t want it to lose all of its relevance, and, saying he still had a platform, he felt more comfortable continuing to tweet about nonsports topics on the account. He also stated that he is less interested in growing the account than he used to be. He said that he will only make graphics. “here and there.”
And yet, scan Twitter and you’ll see that just because Matt won’t be mass-creating graphics, doesn’t mean such images aren’t being put out. There are still Ballsack Sports reporters like Lane Richardson, Ron BillmeryAnd Rob Buchanan—none of them are Matt, and he is unaware of most of their real-life identities. A @BallsackSports Instagram account, run by someone he didn’t know, continues to produce graphics. Similar themed accounts, such as @ButtcrackSports (which recently fooled Trae Young) and @NutsackNetwork, continue to share fabricated statements as well. Fake sports graphics won’t disappear.
Gipson warns people “If there’s something that makes you laugh, crazy, angry, stop and think for a second”Before you share it. Or you could be fired.
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