The day after James Harden was traded from the Nets to the 76ers, a story circulated about where the breaking point was between 2018 league MVP and Brooklyn star Kyrie Irving. It has been posited that Irving beat Harden one-for-one on almost a daily basis and that the Nets’ ball-handling assistant even once called his teammate “washed” after locking him up in a scrum. The story spread across the web — a Google search for “Kyrie Irving James Harden Washed” last month returned nearly two million results — and eventually over the airwaves of ESPN, where it was mentioned three times by two different analysts in two different months . And yet the incidents in question never actually happened.
Instead, the report on Twitter grew out of a tweet and an accompanying graphic that garnered more than 40,000 likes. While the initial information has been credited to a “Brooklyn Nets executive,” its actual creator was @BallsackSports, an account that has amassed around 170,000 followers on the platform in the 10 months since its launch.
Twitter accounts inventing fables about athletes, coaches and teams are nothing new. A quick search of the platform, for example, reveals dozens whose handles are slight variations on the names of prominent sports newsmakers. (Remember when @Ken_Rosenthal_, not to be confused with MLB insider @Ken_Rosenthal, broke the story about a deal David Price made to the Tigers in 2014?) But last September, Ballsack Sports, with what its founder says, began a Ohioan called Matt to expose how misinformation is spreading online. Because of this, when naming his account, Matt wanted a name that was “as illegitimate as possible” and didn’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 as obvious as Ballsack Sports,” he says. “The logo itself was BS. It’s a game with cops—.”
For months, the account was successful in achieving virality, although its nickname was a clear indication. Graphics from the raw grip have been cited as legitimate on FoxNews.com and on various basketball-centric websites. A digital community formed, in which followers often responded with “You got fired” to posts that managed to dupe. Current NBA players like Kevin Durant and Myles Turner follow the account ESPN analyst JJ Redick once tweeted about, “Ballsack Sports is the greatest thing that can happen to NBA Twitter.” Individual “reporters” from Ballsack Sports – they are not officially affiliated with the founder or the original account — even began appearing online, and an Instagram account with nearly 500,000 followers, @ballsacksport, took over the brand, unbeknownst to Matt at first.
For a month, from mid-May to mid-June, Matt deactivated the account, saying it was a successful experiment that ran its course. In the last 10 days, however, Ballsack Sports has returned, and Matt said he not only wants to use his platform to create the occasional “more harmless, but more humorous” graphic, but also to discuss topics unrelated to sports.
Back in January, 76ers basketball operations president Daryl Morey went to a Philadelphia radio station and “begged people not to get too attached to Ballsack Sports’ tweets and take them seriously.” And while Morey’s plea may be appropriate given the Ben Simmons trade rumours, the account’s existence has shed lessons about Twitter, misinformation and the state of the sports media. As Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard once said, “I think we live in a world where a lot of idiots can’t tell if something’s real or fake.” Well… actually, Lillard didn’t say that. But Ballsack Sports released a graphic saying he did.
Ballsack Sports’ most iconic graphic was conceived in a McDonald’s parking lot. In February, Matt felt inspired to take on traditional talk show debates between old and new minds. Instead of picking a player who was drafted before LeBron James, he tried to think of one who had entered the league after LeBron but had already left the NBA. While waiting in the drive-through line, Matt pulled out his cell phone, scanned a 2004 NBA draft basketball reference list, and saw a name that he felt was a perfect fit: “I think that’s it right there. i love josh smith He was cold, he’s been retired for a few years now.”
Most ballsack graphics take about three to five minutes to create. This particular one, Matt says, “took a few minutes longer” as he wanted to find the perfect image and complement it with a quote that would result in the widest reach. He ordered two Diet Cokes, settled into a parking lot, and began piecing the graphic together. “It was a different game back then, much more physical,” Smith said in the image. “I don’t think [LeBron] has the jump shot or the skills to dominate defense as consistently then as he does now. There is so much distance in today’s game. We had 2-3 guys on a star player every night. Nothing was easy.” Matt posted it and watched it take off.
Here’s an important caveat to this story: Journalists, including myself, make honest mistakes, and many media outlets, including those I write for, sometimes take lively quotes out of context; The point of this piece is not to shame any person or place. Despite this, hours after the Smith graphic was posted to Twitter, Outkick.com published an article with the headline: “Former NBA player Josh Smith says LeBron James couldn’t have dominated his era.” The article – which was later deleted — was shared via a syndicate on FoxNews.com and posted to Fox’s Twitter feed, which has more than 20 million followers. Ballsack Sports was specifically mentioned in the text of the story. “I thought, ‘You must be kidding,'” says Matt.
Last September, Matt saw a tweet from 76ers center Joel Embiid in which the Philadelphia star expressed his frustration with NBA Twitter. “You all have no idea how much this medium makes up for followers and you are ashamed that you believed them,” Embiid wrote. This message was part of Matt’s impetus to found Ballsack Sports. He wanted to create a platform that could fabricate information and use it to gain an audience. “Success for me was getting as much exposure as possible,” says Matt. He grew up on stories from ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated and Bleacher Report, but most of his own sports consumption had been reduced to a headline and a picture. “I feel like a lot of sports media, or media in general, has gone fast food in that sense,” he says. But when the Smith chart was aggregated, even Matt was a little surprised how something that took only minutes to create could have such reach.
There’s a 1993 New York cartoon of a dog sitting in a desk chair with one paw on a computer keyboard and looking down at another pooch next to him. “No one on the internet knows you’re a dog,” says the receptionist.
Online, words can be masked anonymously, giving way to an extra sense of freedom. They can also be taken out of context. Leticia Bode, an associate professor at Georgetown whose research specializes in political communication, new media and misinformation, says the lines between misinformation and satire tend to blur on social media. “If you take that very information completely out of context,” says Bode, “then it can easily become misinformation once someone is convinced of it.” Especially, she adds, “if they’re sharing it organically, as if it’s real.” would.”
Michael Mirer, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies the shift in journalistic professionalism with a focus on sports, notes that misinformation can also spread when users adopt formatting standards — such as using the word report or breaking to open one Tweet, or sources say [INSERT OUTLET NAME] at the end of it. Such easily imitated practices are the reason why Awful Announcing once wrote an article entitled “So Why Are There So Many Fake Adrian Wojnarowski Twitter Accounts?” To a lesser extent, Matt also mimics the work of team social media accounts and various other channels that often compile graphics about NBA rumors, although his process is much less detailed. “I don’t even proofread,” he says. “And sometimes I make spelling mistakes and stuff like that and things still went viral.”
If you tuned into CBS Radio on the night of October 30, 1938, you might have thought Martians were about to invade New Jersey. For nearly an hour, starting at 8 p.m., actor Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater presented an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, an event that revealed the power of fake news. A 23-year-old Welles, according to A. Brad Schwartz, a Ph.D. Princeton University student and author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News, wanted to entertain a national audience and tell a dramatic story in an imaginative way. But, Schwartz says, the famous show ended up being “a moment when people questioned the authenticity of what they were getting over the airwaves in a way they never had before.” Some listeners later wondered, in Schwartz’s words, “How do we know when news is news or if it’s just fiction?”
Decades later, with more and more readers visiting Ballsack Sports, Matt wanted people to think about the same question. Therefore, on March 1st, he began drawing attention more explicitly to the literal elements of his online graphics. He shared one in which Lillard said he was dealing with “so many jerks who hate my loyalty every day,” leading the quote to a “42. Interview that never happened with Ballsack Sports”. Days later, on March 5, Matt made an even more explicit plea for critical thinking by posting a graphic, again featuring Lillard, with the phrase “Fake Quote” in the middle. A line above read: “Does a graphic mean that a player actually said something? NO! Can someone download a picture of lady and add text? YES!” And a line below said, “Search for a link or story before replying. Don’t take a graphic at face value.”
Explaining his goals, Matt says, “I really want to transform media literacy in that sense. I was frustrated that so many people are biting and taking the bait.”
Brooklyne Gipson, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Illinois and a research associate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, notes that content that is “emotionally provoking” is often the most shared on social media. Mirer adds that audiences are “mostly just looking for things to mobilize.” Case in point: In November, a Ballsack Sports graphic featuring a fictionalized excerpt from Scottie Pippen’s biography, in which Pippen said Jordan “ruined the game of basketball,” circulated online.
Bode, the Georgetown professor, says the misinformation concept known as the data void — high demand for information on a given topic when little information is available — also helps explain the rise of Ballsack Sports. One such data gap, Bode says, was linked to the spring 2020 surge in COVID-19 misinformation. Now, as tiny sports news continues to become a larger part of the sports media ecosystem and audiences clamor for the slightest rumor, the lack of clear public information makes it more likely that fake transactional tweets would surface like they did with Ballsack Sports.
Graphics tied to breaking news — like the playoffs or free agency — also tend to pop. Less than 30 minutes after the 76ers lost the second round to the Heat in early May, Ballsack Sports shared a picture of Harden quoting, “I just want the best talent around me to win a championship. I’m not sure we’re quite there.” After firing just two shots in the second half of Game 6, Harden was the target of intense public discourse, making him an ideal ballsack athlete at the moment.
More than a month later, as the Lakers’ offseason was being talked about online, Ballsack Sports shared a photo of the team’s former coach, Frank Vogel, with a tagline that said Vogel thought the 2020 NBA title felt “cheap.” ” on. It prompted Morey to chime in on Twitter: “Guess someone’s getting fired over this.”
Made-up quotes about pro basketball are generally a harmless form of misinformation. As CNN reporter (and fact-checker) Daniel Dale observed on Twitter, “Thousands of people daily falling for fake sports quotes posted by an account called ‘Ballsack Sports’ doesn’t inspire much confidence in the society’s ability to co-operate.” to circumvent political misinformation.” Gipson, an Illinois professor, adds that the fact that Ballsack Sports’ work has so often been treated as genuine demonstrates the challenges social platforms have in managing parody accounts, and what happens when spread misinformation. Once someone on SportsCenter hears that a lyric from LeBron played a part in Tom Brady’s return to the Buccaneers (a graphic from Ballsack Sports saying it blew up), it’s difficult to break the record for a mass audience to correct. Corrections, says Gipson, are “much more forgettable than remembering the lie.”
Here’s some news for a real chart: Ballsack Sports is no longer a place that only shows fake basketball reviews. This spring, Matt used the reach of his account for other purposes. In the weeks leading up to his decision to close it, he tweeted about the importance of mental health awareness, the shooting that killed 10 people in Buffalo, the difference between explicit and implicit racial bias, and about microaggressions.
As a result of diving into such waters, he says, he’s received some backlash online, whether because of the content of his tweets or because his satirical sports account didn’t stick with the sport. Matt says such responses “played a factor” that pushed him to temporarily disable Ballsack Sports, adding that creating fake sports graphics “is what I’m least passionate about right now.”
“Sometimes it might be great news, but not from a messenger that people will take seriously at first,” he says. “I know my account was still growing, but I didn’t want to create crazier quotes, crazier quotes, more damaging quotes to elicit more reactions. It’s just not who I am.”
Matt says he has received offers to buy the account from him over the past few months. But he passed because he didn’t want potential monetization to be his priority. Instead, in discussing his current existence, he resorts to what he calls Ballsack’s “directed trajectory”: “ascending, culminating where consciousness was diffused; compelling mainstream media; getting attention from journalists everywhere; and then phased out as it was no longer needed.”
Explaining why he brought it back after a month-long hiatus, Matt says he didn’t want it to lose all of its relevance and that since he still has a platform, he feels more comfortable continuing on non-sports topics to tweet the account. He also says he’s less focused on growing the account now than he used to be, noting that he’ll only be making charts “here and there.”
And yet, scan Twitter and you’ll see that just because Matt doesn’t mass-produce graphics doesn’t mean such images don’t get published. There are still reporters from Ballsack Sports like Lane Richardson, Ron Billmery and Rob Buchanan – none of them are Matt, and he doesn’t know most of their real-life identities. An @BallsackSports Instagram account run by someone he didn’t know continues to produce graphics. Similarly themed accounts like @ButtcrackSports (who recently duped Trae Young) and @NutsackNetwork continue to share fabricated statements as well. Fake sports graphics will not go away.
Gipson warns people, “If there’s something that makes you laugh, mad, mad, stop and think for a second” before you share it. Oh, and find the original source too or you risk getting fired too.
More daily covers: • Is Chet Holmgren the future of basketball? • Armando Bacot follows the money, straight back to school • Mercury’s Tina Charles always adapts • In the warriors’ long-awaited return to glory
