Did You Hear About Caitlin Clark Leaving the WNBA??
As social media becomes less and less reliable, what are sports fans—and sports reporters—supposed to do?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Eben discusses a New Year’s Resolution…
Every year for Sportico's year-end holiday party, we put on a private industry awards show called the Sportys. Most of the categories and winners I'll take to my grave, but Worst Tweet is one that I love to put together and would be happy to share. (Prior winners include this, this and this).
These past few weeks, however, I struggled to compile a good list for 2024. Screenshots of deleted posts seem far less reliable, many users have left for other platforms, and people are changing how they use X. The removal of timestamps and edit history also muddied the process. Few posts stood out in my memory, and the process of retroactively verifying new ones forced me to confront a long-simmering feeling.
If I can't trust social media for the Sportys, why rely on it at all?
Like millions1 of Americans, one of my New Year's Resolutions is to spend less time doom scrolling social media in my spare time. But I'm also hoping to spend less time on it professionally.
That's a bit of a scary proposition. For the past 15 years, social media has been a critical way for journalists to source news, share their work, build a following, interact with readers, and measure their success while doing it. Now it feels like all that is starting to unwind.
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Long before it posed an existential problem for reporters, Twitter revolutionized journalism. I still remember the moment when I recognized that things were different.
In January 2011, Denver Broncos GM John Elway announced the team's next head coach... via Twitter. I was a Bloomberg intern tasked with writing generic sports news, so I rushed to put a story on the wire.
When he saw that I was citing a Twitter account, one of my editors pushed back. Sure, Elway was a reliable source, but was a Twitter user that bore his name a reliable source? The account, which had been created just a few weeks prior, seemed very clearly to be Elway's2, but of course I couldn't be 100% sure. As a solution, I called the team to verify that the post was real. Bloomberg abandoned the practice later that year, but it was a thing we did for a while. If Elway wasn't on video, or quoted in a trusted publication, his social media account wasn't enough.
By January 2012, a year later, all of my colleagues had Twitter open at all times. I’ve basically had it up for every working moment since.
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Back in 2011, social media was so new that it couldn't be trusted in newsrooms. Fourteen years later, social media is so unreliable that it's nearing a similar status.
I won't spend any time discussing the rise of misinformation on social media. You've all seen it, and people smarter than me have broken it down, but this stat has stuck with me: In a recent survey from Tech Policy Press, 71% of U.S. voters said social media companies should do more to prioritize preventing false claims, even if it means limiting some speech.
Ironically, sports is one of the areas where I see the least social media misinformation. Sure, there’s always been the fake Adam Schefter accounts, or the my-buddy-works-for-the-team rumor mill, but we’ve largely avoided the celebrity deep fakes or coordinated false reports that have pervaded discourse on Hollywood, politics and generic breaking news.
This is not to say, however, that it doesn’t exist. One of my Sportico colleagues was shocked to hear over Thanksgiving that a family member was convinced Caitlin Clark had left the WNBA for a team in Spain.
He’d “learned” that from videos on Facebook and YouTube, and it turns out, there’s a lot of them. I watched a few over the weekend, and I encourage you to do the same. Caitlin Clark Takes the European Basketball Scene by STORM!, which has more than 139,000 views, tells watchers that Clark signed a lifetime contract in Barcelona, and discusses the fan reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. ESPN Drops MAJOR News on Caitlin Clark’s NEW European Contract, relies heavily on real news about the WNBA’s race reckoning before pivoting to ESPN’s dismay at “letting their golden ticket walk out the door.”
The videos are well-produced, no doubt with assistance from AI. They lean heavily on highlights of Clark (in a WNBA jersey no less), and sprinkle in selectively edited clips of her press conferences, ESPN talk show segments, and fan interviews. They use some real information—history about WNBA stars also playing in Europe, controversy during Clark’s rookie season—as context for the big central lie. If you’re not following the sport closely, they’re plenty believable.
Sadly, I see a lot more of this in our future. Sports isn’t immune to the misinformation gambit, it’s just been late to see it arrive.
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Elon Musk is of course wrong about the idea that the millions of X accounts are the new media. The narrative is good for his worldview, his politics and his wallet, but if accuracy is something you care about in your news-gathering, X is becoming a less and less useful tool.
Maybe that changes. Or maybe we’re all fucked. Or maybe the places doing real journalism—like Sportico!—see a surge in support as people try to reset their news diets.
I'm honestly not quite sure where all this leaves me as a mid-career professional in media, but I just subscribed to a few more reliable news outlets this week as part of my New Year’s Resolution. I hope others do the same.
If not, who knows, maybe I’ll move to Barcelona like Caitlin Clark.
Jacob’s ⚡️ Take: Just before reading this, I spent too much time confirming that a screenshot of NCAA rules showing that Arizona State should have won yesterday’s Peach Bowl on a bouncing field goal—with 2.3 million views and counting—was entirely fabricated. Before that, I was trying to figure out if an account purporting to be NBC Rules analyst Terry McAulay was actually penned by him. We’ve quickly reached shitshow status, and I too spent some time over the holidays updating my subscriptions in the hopes of replacing social media with newsletters in 2025. Here’s to a healthier media diet in the New Year!
Programming Note: The Pick Six now comes in a separate post, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
Probably. Should be.
In major U.S. sports, Elway was an early adopter of Twitter as a way to give fans insight into team decisions. He has nearly a million followers but hasn’t posted in nearly two full years.
of course Catlin hasnt left the wnba! she is a fighter and she wouldnt leave just becasue of other girls were rude! She is literly my hero, and thats why