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It Would be Nice if Someone at Meta Gave Even Half a Shit About the Fake Accounts Sharing Fake Quotes
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If you missed it on Saturday, there was a lively discussion between Matvei Michkov, Jaroslav Svejkovsy, and Rick Tocchet on the Flyers’ bench. This was a few minutes into the 2nd period of a game the Flyers lost 5-4 in a shootout.
A lot of people made assumptions about what was said, but the fake fan accounts on Facebook just made up some fake shit entirely:
Typical playbook here. It’s a fake quote with a link in the comments to some fake website in Hong Kong. Harmless if nobody engages, but with a combination of bots and gullible fans who don’t have media training, they’re able to generate enough activity to play the algorithm and earn the rev share dollars. There are countless Eagles “fan pages” that are the same thing, run by some guy in Vietnam who either hacks the page of an inactive American business and/or creates one out of thin air.
As a result, it junks up the algo and decreases visibility for pages run by real people who actually live in this area and actually do follow the Flyers and the other teams. Organic social numbers dip because the fake Asian pages eat up the bandwidth and crowd everyone else. And the people who don’t realize the scam go about their day thinking that Matvei Michkov is petulant.
The real problem is that nobody at Meta seems to give a flying fuck about any of this. We can report until we’re blue in the face, but unless big tech starts taking misinformation seriously, then it doesn’t matter. Elon Musk certainly does not care about the proliferation of fake horseshit on X. Then you’ve got TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, etc. It’s all the same. Big tech has no incentive to police their own platforms because user engagement, in this case 313 comments on a fake Flyers post, contributes to data collection and targeted advertising. It contributes to the rabbit-hole effect that keeps people on the site. Then you throw A.I. in the mix and it’s not even the Wild West anymore, it’s a Ted Nugent-style free for all.
Anyway, “Philadelphia Flyers Fan Zone” can go “straight to hell,” as Maxine Waters once said. Please join us in the fight against fake news. Anyone who participates, I’ll buy you a Wawa dark roast coffee before they take away the flavor forever.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com