What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: NFL Misinformation

We’re fully into the NFL’s 2023 and the biggest real controversy this season is a low-key debate about banning the QB sneak (either to protect quarterbacks or because the Philadelphia Eagles do it too well.) Meanwhile, there’s firestorm of imaginary controversy raging in the inboxes and Facebooks feeds of culture warriors. The issue? Kneeling during the national anthem.

Taking a knee as a way of protesting racism hasn’t been a thing in the NFL since 2018, but the idea that players are refusing to stand for the National Anthem is so appealing to some people that they’re willing to invent examples of it.

Here are only a few headlines that have been published in the last month:

Before being spread all over Facebook by your weird aunt, these “news stories” originated on a site called “SpaceXMania.com.” I’ll spare you the link to the adware and pop-up laden site itself, but I’m sure you can imagine what it looks like.

According to SpaceXmania’s “about” page, the site is dedicated to “building a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about space exploration and technology.” The content, however, is almost all racially charged fake stories that look almost exactly like real news.

Whatever infernal algorithm informs SpaceXMania’s editorial content has apparently determined that its community of passionate space-exploration fans want most to read AI-generated articles about a long-dead controversy, as long as they have a tag that reads “satire.”

It’s not the only site like this, either. Another example, Dunning Kruger Times, recently posted a story headed “Jets Head Coach Takes a Stand: ‘Put Kaepernick On The Practice Squad And I Quit.’” It’s a theme.

Although he hasn’t played in the NFL since 2017, Colin Kaepernick still seems like public enemy number one on these sites. I’ll bet you can work out out why. Kaepernick warrants his own hashtag on SpaceXMania. He has been the subject of 12 fake articles in the last month alone, while Elon Musk, the supposed reason the site exists, has been featured in only four stories in the same amount of time, two of which are just digs at another outspoken African American: “Breaking: Whoopi Goldberg Faceplants During Interview With Elon Musk,” and “Just in: Whoopi Goldberg Gets Schooled By Elon Musk For Being A Bully On The View.”

What is satire?

Satire, according to dictionary.com, is “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices.” It’s hard to see how SpaceXMania fits this definition.

To illustrate, this is parody about the NFL:

NFL Introduces New Helmet Designed To Protect Players’ Wives

This isn’t:

Breaking: Coach Belichick Just Fired An Anthem Kneeler, ‘Not On My Field’

Facebook’s (these things always spread on Facebook) policy on downplaying misinformation acknowledges that there is a “fine line between false news and satire or opinion,” and it’s true that satire can sometimes be hard to spot, like that time The New York Times thought Barack Obama had been on the cover of Tiger Beat, but in the case of SpaceXMania and other sites like it, it’s clearly fake news. Its stories aren’t funny. They aren’t making some larger point about politics or culture. They are articles clearly packaged to look and read as much like actual news as possible, designed to trick the easily fooled into feeling angry and clicking weird ads.

The AI that compiles SpaceXMania’s stories even includes “both sides” paragraphs like, as a way of seeming more legit:

“As for the Kansas City Chiefs, their unity remains intact. Both Reid and Kelce, despite their differing stands, have expressed mutual respect for each other’s decisions. The episode serves as a testament to the fact that even in times of disagreement, understanding and dialogue can pave the way forward.”

Is there a way to stop fake news “satires?”

There is probably nothing that can be done to stop the spread of fake news stories posing as satire. Political speech and satire are both broadly protected by the first amendment, and one of the preconditions for any kind of legal action would be the standard of whether a “reasonable person” would mistake it for the truth. Even if the content is aimed at the most unreasonable people in society.

That leaves only attempts to “debunk” this kind of misinformation. Many people do a heroic job of this, particularly Snopes, but the kind of people sharing outrage-bait stories on Facebook about kneeling during the national anthem probably aren’t reading Snopes.