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‘Tis the Season for Gullible Adults to Fall for Fake Eagles News on Facebook
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This TikTok makes my blood boil and my eyeballs pop out of their sockets:
@esquiresports Everyone got there critical thinking caps ! #nfl #football #eagles #jalenhurts #baltimore #lamarjackson #niners #georgekittle #bills #greenscreen ♬ original sound – Michael
This is nothing new. Facebook is rife with these fake Eagles accounts that have tens of thousands of followers. In this case “The Eagles Nest” posted on Tuesday morning that Dick Vermeil died, which is not true. Coach is still with us. On Monday, they posted that “Philadelphia Eagles spiritual leader Saquon Barkley announces boycott of NFL Pride Night: “On the field, the focus should be on football, not WOKE.” Also false. And then inside the comments they link you to some bullshit Asian website called “Hot News” which assaults your computer with ads piled on top of A.I. stories.
Funny enough, there’s a physical address in the Eagles Nest “about” section that reads 800 Virgil Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90029, United States. That’s the location of a Salvadoran restaurant in East Hollywood. The Facebook account’s phone number is also the restaurant phone number, yet in the “page transparency” section is says the account manager is located in Vietnam, so they just picked some random California restaurant as the fake address. We’ll have to call the Salvadorans in a few hours (it’s 7 a.m. there) and tell ’em their address is being used inappropriately.
It’s one thing to have your parents and grandparents fall for this stuff. They are not media literate and can’t easily identify what’s real and what’s not. But the real issue is cauterizing the wound at its source, which means flagging these accounts and/or preventing their creation in the first place. All you can really do is report and see if the humongous, faceless tech companies actually do anything. This particular page has already grown to 17,000 followers and has been operational for eight months. And Meta, X, and TikTok have so many millions of users that it’s really impossible to cut out everything entirely. It’s like a pointless and global game of whack-a-mole, and they don’t really care anyway. Big tech holds a lot of the blame for creating these platforms and then not moderating them. They’re the main reason for this proliferation of crapola, the reason anybody can create anything and operate without any kind of guardrails or accountability. It’s’ “too much horseshit,” as Peter Laviolette once said.
The fake news sites and troll accounts can go right into dumpster where they belong. They can join the hockey puck that Chris Pronger rightfully took from Ben Eager and the Chicago Blackhawks back in 2010. Put it all in the bagster and drop it in Lake Michigan.
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