Speaker 1: Before we begin, a reminder to please rate and review
Speaker 1: our show. It helps new listeners discover us and grow
Speaker 1: the program. On this episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly, when
Speaker 1: balsax sports started posting made up reports on social media
Speaker 1: about athletes and coaches and the guys of real journalism,
Speaker 1: it got a ton of attention for fooling all sorts
Speaker 1: of big names, from NBA general managers to talking heads
Speaker 1: on ESPN and Fox News. S I stafford Ben Pickman
Speaker 1: joins us to explain who was behind boss ex Sports,
Speaker 1: how the creator was trying to send a message about
Speaker 1: misinformation and how we consume news in a supersaturated digital age,
Speaker 1: and why the founder recently shut the whole enterprise down.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, John Gonzalez from Sports Illustrated and I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. This is Sports Illustrated Weekly. Alright, Ben, So
Speaker 1: this is a particularly unusual story. I'm not sure quite
Speaker 1: how to put this delicately, so I'll just put it.
Speaker 1: What does ball sax sports, or rather, what was it?
Speaker 1: Ball sax sports was a Twitter account that started last
Speaker 1: September and amassed more than a hundred and eighty thousand
Speaker 1: followers on the platform in the nine months before it
Speaker 1: was deactivated, and what it was, exactly john, was an
Speaker 1: account that made up fake sports graphics, taking photos of
Speaker 1: players and making up quotes and posting that on its
Speaker 1: feed and watching those quotes go viral. The creator of
Speaker 1: ball Sack Sports did it as a way to try
Speaker 1: and expose how misinformation spread online. That was one of
Speaker 1: his intentions when he was creating the account. And he
Speaker 1: had this hypothesis that he could gain an audience doing so,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to test his hypothesis out, and he
Speaker 1: kind of created this account using a humorous name, an
Speaker 1: obscene name, one that he said was so out there,
Speaker 1: so blatantly obvious, like ball sack Sports, and he kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to just saturate the market with a ton
Speaker 1: of these fake NBA quote graphics. So who is this
Speaker 1: mad scientist behind in the sociology experiment who came up
Speaker 1: with a name soaper raising and so obvious that somehow
Speaker 1: it was so clever that people couldn't figure it out.
Speaker 1: He is a person named Matt. He lives in Ohio
Speaker 1: and he grew up reading websites like ESPN, dot com
Speaker 1: and Bleacher Report. He was a reader of Sports Illustrated
Speaker 1: and he was a sports fan, and is still a
Speaker 1: sports fan, but he watched as he aged how his
Speaker 1: own consumption kind of changed and he started to read
Speaker 1: less and less, and he recognized that his feed and
Speaker 1: people around him, some of his peers, were mostly consuming
Speaker 1: sports information by headlines and seeing graphics. And so that's
Speaker 1: some of what he's kind of playing into. I feel
Speaker 1: like a lot of the sports media, or media in general,
Speaker 1: has become like fast food. I stopped reading. Everything seemed
Speaker 1: to be more streamed. Here's the story, here's a pick.
Speaker 1: And that was some of the impetus for ball Sack Sports.
Speaker 1: You know, he is a big basketball fan himself, and
Speaker 1: you know this is SI Weekly, this is your podcast, John,
Speaker 1: and so every show needs to have a sixer's tie.
Speaker 1: I mean so last September, Matt actually saw a tweet
Speaker 1: from Joel embiid y'all have no idea how much this
Speaker 1: media makes up stuff for followers, and shame on you
Speaker 1: for believing them. And that was some of the impetus
Speaker 1: for creating this account. He wanted to kind of play
Speaker 1: off some of what Embid was poking fun out or
Speaker 1: calling out in his tweet, And as I was saying,
Speaker 1: he wanted to expose misinformation and how it kind of
Speaker 1: spread online, and he thought he could do a pretty
Speaker 1: good job of doing so, and it turns out he did.
Speaker 1: He did a great job of it. And I want
Speaker 1: to get into some of the things that he tweeted
Speaker 1: out and some of the people that he do. We
Speaker 1: call it sacking. What do we call when he when
Speaker 1: he ends up tricking these people? Sacking is the right term.
Speaker 1: I mean, he kind of built up a community of
Speaker 1: people in the ball Sacks sports community and whenever someone
Speaker 1: would get duped, a lot of people, thousands of people
Speaker 1: sometimes would go in the comments on Twitter and say
Speaker 1: you got sacked. So, yes, sacking is definitely the right
Speaker 1: term in this contex. Sure, we're adults and we went
Speaker 1: to journalism school, so we'll we'll discuss the sacking later.
Speaker 1: But I had noticed that you you call him Matt,
Speaker 1: You mentioned that he's from Ohio. This is precious little
Speaker 1: information on the man behind this account, the man behind
Speaker 1: the curtain? Is that by design? Can you tell us
Speaker 1: anything more about him? Why are we only getting little
Speaker 1: sippets of information on who was behind ball Sack Sports. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he just kind of wanted to keep his
Speaker 1: identity a little bit private as he was talking about
Speaker 1: these matters. He has other things going on in his life.
Speaker 1: This is not his day job, nor is it his career.
Speaker 1: So I think he was just cognizant of that. All right.
Speaker 1: Uh So he starts his account in September and it
Speaker 1: blows up, I would imagine, beyond his wildest dreams. When
Speaker 1: did it first really get on people's radars. I would
Speaker 1: say it really started to get on people's radar around
Speaker 1: January or February. Um, there was an instance of Darryl
Speaker 1: Moorey again another Sixers reference on this show, going on
Speaker 1: to Philadelphia radio station, and Darryl on a program actually
Speaker 1: acknowledged ball sack sports. I mean we had we had
Speaker 1: a trade debated. It might even be this one that
Speaker 1: was tweeted up ball sack sports. I mean like people
Speaker 1: were treating that like it was a real thing. I
Speaker 1: think that was yesterday or two days ago. So like,
Speaker 1: I'm employing people to not get too attached to ball
Speaker 1: sacks for tweets and treat them. The night before Darryl
Speaker 1: made that appearance, he had been tagged in a graphic
Speaker 1: related to Ben Simmons trade rumors that was made up
Speaker 1: completely and was just put out by the ball sack
Speaker 1: Sports account. Um. And so that kind of led to
Speaker 1: Darryl calling it out and that was a big popularity
Speaker 1: coup for the account itself. UM. I would say the
Speaker 1: most famous, most notable example of ball sack sports came
Speaker 1: in February, and that was when Fox News ended up
Speaker 1: kind of syndicating aggregating a story that was initially shared
Speaker 1: by ball sax sports and posted it on their Twitter feed,
Speaker 1: which has twenty million followers. Yeah. The first time I
Speaker 1: became aware of bassack Sports was the Darryl Morey situation because,
Speaker 1: as you have noted, I'm plugged into all things Philadelphia
Speaker 1: and all things Philadelphia seventy sixers, and I saw that
Speaker 1: Darryl Moorey went on the local radio station and mentioned
Speaker 1: ball sax sports and I thought, Darryl, this can't possibly
Speaker 1: be real, And of course it wasn't, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people were not clued into that. And you mentioned
Speaker 1: that Josh Smith thing that really got a lot of traction.
Speaker 1: It fooled Fox Sports twice. He made up something about
Speaker 1: Scottie Pippen, a quote that wasn't in his latest book
Speaker 1: that got people all riled up about Michael Jordan's and
Speaker 1: it also fooled you know credit where it's too. Our employer,
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrated was also duped by this thing. But what
Speaker 1: I loved about your piece is that you mentioned that
Speaker 1: this big conceit that he came up with that duped
Speaker 1: so many people was conceived in a McDonald's parking lot. Right,
Speaker 1: what what specifically did he say about Josh Smith and
Speaker 1: Lebron James. So, Josh Smith, as we said, is perhaps
Speaker 1: the most famous example of a ball SAX sports graphic
Speaker 1: going viral, and as you mentioned, it was created in
Speaker 1: a McDonald's parking lot. Um. I should say for context,
Speaker 1: most of these graphics take Matp just a few minutes
Speaker 1: to create. Once I get the idea to tweeting, maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, three or five minutes. He uses the
Speaker 1: Bizarre app, which is just a kind of normal iPhone
Speaker 1: photo app, and he starts to piece his graphics together
Speaker 1: by looking for stock images. And he often doesn't even
Speaker 1: start a new project. He's just layering things on top
Speaker 1: of each other and hiding old ones underneath. I get
Speaker 1: an image from Internet, put it on the same format
Speaker 1: I got, maybe changed up where I put the quotation
Speaker 1: marks and everything, but I don't put much effort into
Speaker 1: them at all. But this Josh Smith graphic was created
Speaker 1: in the McDonald's parking lot, and he came up with
Speaker 1: the idea to riff off of old players, oftentimes bashing
Speaker 1: current players. I'm going through the drive drew and then mine,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of cries. I've been wanting to make
Speaker 1: an old head for town head quote and allow, and
Speaker 1: so when he was thinking of a version, a way
Speaker 1: to kind of tell that story, a way to create
Speaker 1: that graphic, he actually wanted to play off of that
Speaker 1: and use a retired player, but one who was drafted
Speaker 1: after Lebron on James, I'm on basketball restaurants going to
Speaker 1: the two thousand for NBA draft and I see Josh missing,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, that's it right there. I get my
Speaker 1: two large diet codes. I got a part. He then
Speaker 1: found a photo of Josh Smith. He created this graphic
Speaker 1: that said Lebron couldn't play my day, writing specifically that quote,
Speaker 1: I don't think he Lebron has the jump shot or
Speaker 1: skills to really consistently dominate defenses then as he does today.
Speaker 1: This has a very funny point to whet it with
Speaker 1: him being the old head draft the Lebron, which was
Speaker 1: what made it b viral, the essence of him being
Speaker 1: younger than Lebron. He did this in a McDonald's parking lot.
Speaker 1: He did this with two diet cokes. He did this
Speaker 1: in just a few minutes, and then he watched his
Speaker 1: one website, OutKick dot Com, wrote it up. It was
Speaker 1: syndicated on Fox news dot Com, shared on Fox's Twitter feed,
Speaker 1: which was more than twenty million followers, and he kind
Speaker 1: of watch as it took off from now and I
Speaker 1: found that to be hilarious that I just in all
Speaker 1: of the at McDonald's, So Matt, no last name that
Speaker 1: we're using from Ohio, no specific location or occupation that
Speaker 1: we're using, creates this thing and it blows up. And
Speaker 1: he ends up getting seventy sixers general manager Darren Moore,
Speaker 1: he ends up getting Fox Sports, he ends up getting
Speaker 1: Fox News, He ends up getting Sports Illustrated. He also
Speaker 1: got Kendrick Perkins in ESPN too, right, Yes, he did
Speaker 1: Kendrick Perkins, Stephen A. Smith, both of them both on
Speaker 1: the same story. You know. Another notable Bossax Sports story
Speaker 1: came on the day after James Harden was traded from
Speaker 1: the Nets to the seventies sixers, and this was a
Speaker 1: story that started circulating about what the breaking point was
Speaker 1: between the two thousand eighteen League MVP and Star Brooklyn
Speaker 1: guard Kyrie Irving. And on this graphic it posited that
Speaker 1: Irving beat Harden in one on one almost daily and
Speaker 1: that Irving would even once called Harden washed after locking
Speaker 1: him up in a scrimmage. And this tale kind of
Speaker 1: spread across the Internet and people wrote it up, and
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, Kendrick Perkins alluded to it, so did
Speaker 1: Steven A. Smith. But of course the report originated on
Speaker 1: Twitter from a tweet and graphic that received more than
Speaker 1: forty lights. On the graphic, the information was attributed to
Speaker 1: Quota Brooklyn Nets executive, but as we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: its actual creator was just Balls ex Sports. So what
Speaker 1: did Matt think while all this was going on? Because
Speaker 1: his intention was to do people, to sack people, and
Speaker 1: he was clearly very very successful, But also it gained
Speaker 1: a level of attention and notoriety that I would expect
Speaker 1: was beyond his wildest dreams. Not only where all these
Speaker 1: major media outlets stooped by him, but concurrently there was
Speaker 1: sort of this meta observation of what he was doing
Speaker 1: by people who did realize that ball Sack Sports was
Speaker 1: not a real outlet. You're one of those people. Awful
Speaker 1: Announcing mentioned it. He ends up going on w f
Speaker 1: a N, the major radio station in New York, to
Speaker 1: talk about how it's all a work as this is happening,
Speaker 1: what is his understanding and how is he processing all this.
Speaker 1: He voiced that the Josh Smith graphic was kind of
Speaker 1: the first time where he felt it was maybe getting
Speaker 1: a little bit too big. I think I was saying
Speaker 1: a lot of accounts like to emulate the same catch graphics,
Speaker 1: fake quote thing. I was like, Okay, how do we
Speaker 1: harness this under control? I don't want to help critics
Speaker 1: ship in that sentence of media literacy, he started to
Speaker 1: more explicitly draw attention to the literal components of a
Speaker 1: graphic and try and really call it out, make it
Speaker 1: even more obvious than coming from a ball Sack Sports
Speaker 1: Twitter account that these graphics were fake. So he shared
Speaker 1: one in which Damian Lillard, who was another frequent focus
Speaker 1: of these graphics. Lillard said that he quote dealt with
Speaker 1: so many morons every day hating on my loyalty, and
Speaker 1: he attributed that quote to the forty second interview that
Speaker 1: never ever happened with ball sack Sports. I even highlighted
Speaker 1: morons as a point of irony. I even uh highlighted
Speaker 1: the source where I said for the second interview that
Speaker 1: never happened with ball sack sports, and I put an
Speaker 1: arrow there and practical we're still fighting. Days after that,
Speaker 1: Matt published an even more obviously for critical thinking is
Speaker 1: what I'd call it, of publishing a graphic again with
Speaker 1: Lillard that just said fake quote in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: At the top of that graphic, it said does a
Speaker 1: graphic mena player actually said anything? No, can anyone download
Speaker 1: a pick up dame? In add text, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: blatant things, blatant signs on this graphic that tried to
Speaker 1: call out that this was misinformation, that these graphics were
Speaker 1: not real. Those were He's kind of pleased to the
Speaker 1: wilderness that hey, people, wake up. You should not be
Speaker 1: falling for some of these things, or here are some
Speaker 1: things to look for on the internet when you are
Speaker 1: evaluating is something real or is something fag I was
Speaker 1: frustrated that so many people were taking a bait on
Speaker 1: just everything. It seems like it was frustrating that my
Speaker 1: own account ball sack sports. I thought the name itself
Speaker 1: could eventually give way and people would catch on and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, but it felt like the tweets will
Speaker 1: only become Matt's experiment proved what he was trying to prove.
Speaker 1: And you wrote in your piece you referenced a New
Speaker 1: Yorker cartoon about a dog sitting at a computer, and
Speaker 1: he says, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Well,
Speaker 1: no one really knows what's real anymore, even when they're
Speaker 1: told that it's not real. And I'm wondering what that
Speaker 1: says about the way that we consume not just sports media,
Speaker 1: but quote unquote news in general. Now that people are
Speaker 1: so reluctant to believe what they get, not just from
Speaker 1: reputable news sources, but from saturation of information that we're
Speaker 1: getting daily through social media. And I think that's probably
Speaker 1: exacerbated by people out there, reputable news organizations and reporters
Speaker 1: who want to break news first right, they do it
Speaker 1: through tweets rather than through stories without any fact checkers.
Speaker 1: And this is another component that Matt was really trying
Speaker 1: to get out, right, Who's delivering your news and how
Speaker 1: you're consuming it without a doubt. There's a few things
Speaker 1: I want to say this point. One One of the
Speaker 1: things that's important to keep in mind here in this
Speaker 1: whole conversation is bassax sports and what it's doing is
Speaker 1: relatively innocuous. Right, It's pretty fun and it's pretty harmless.
Speaker 1: It's about sports, it's a lot about trade rumors, it's
Speaker 1: about quotes between players. It's relatively light and topic. But
Speaker 1: he's kind of speaking to some of the things that
Speaker 1: also are present when you think about misinformation as it
Speaker 1: relates to COVID or politics, and so when talking to
Speaker 1: people for this story, there are a lot of things
Speaker 1: that you can take away from why ball sax sports
Speaker 1: was successful that also apply to misinformation more broadly. Right,
Speaker 1: I talked to one professor, Letitia Bodie, who's an associate
Speaker 1: professor Georgetown, and she talked about how the blurring of
Speaker 1: lines of misinformation and satire it easily occurs on social
Speaker 1: media because it's easy to pull something out of context. Right.
Speaker 1: I talked to another academic who said that, you know,
Speaker 1: ballsax sports ability to kind of mimic traditional journalistic standards
Speaker 1: to create graphics that look real and have the kind
Speaker 1: of elements of a real graphic. That's something that is
Speaker 1: common in misinformation and disinformation more broadly. Another expert who
Speaker 1: studies you know, information and communication, Brooklyn Gibson, who's at
Speaker 1: Illinois and Harvard, she noted to me that, you know,
Speaker 1: content that often spurs misinformation is emotionally provocative, and she
Speaker 1: warns people that if there's something that makes you laugh
Speaker 1: or angry, stop and think for a second before sharing it. Right,
Speaker 1: those are all things that apply to ball sax sports
Speaker 1: in this context, but they also speak to you know,
Speaker 1: misinformation and being an Internet consumer more broadly. It does
Speaker 1: not augur well for any of us who consume media
Speaker 1: that a ruse so obvious as ball sax sports could
Speaker 1: not be detected by the preponderance of people who were
Speaker 1: consuming it. And I'm wondering if that is why Matt
Speaker 1: decided to shut this whole thing down. Ultimately, he's more
Speaker 1: successful than he could have possibly hoped for. He's pointing
Speaker 1: out the misinformation and disinformation that goes into our social
Speaker 1: media streams that is consumed by the general public, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, in May, I believe he
Speaker 1: decides to shut it down. Why, what was the inciting
Speaker 1: and vet and what was his thinking there. Matt kind
Speaker 1: of frustrated by the amount of success his own an
Speaker 1: account was having. He said that when he started the account,
Speaker 1: it had a kind of purposeful trajectory. I saw four
Speaker 1: ball sack sports. I kind of wanted to phase out
Speaker 1: ball sack sports by raising awareness and staturating the satire
Speaker 1: enough in the sports media to where accounts like wall
Speaker 1: sack sports and misinformation were no longer successful in these
Speaker 1: kind of forms. By mid May, the account had built
Speaker 1: up a following of around a hundred and eighty thousand
Speaker 1: people online, which is a pretty good size following for
Speaker 1: an account like this, and he said he no longer
Speaker 1: found it purposeful, and he really no longer wanted to
Speaker 1: even create the sense or the semblance of harm for
Speaker 1: some of the people he was tweeting about. So he
Speaker 1: ended up using the account and he started tweeting about
Speaker 1: different topics, mental health awareness, but the shooting in Buffalo
Speaker 1: that killed ten people, about explicit and implicit racial bias,
Speaker 1: about microaggressions. He started to tweet less about sports and
Speaker 1: more about broader topics, and he said that as he
Speaker 1: waded into those waters. He received some backlash, whether it
Speaker 1: was because of the content of his literal tweets or
Speaker 1: because he was just not sticking to sports. He was
Speaker 1: not sticking to fake quote graphics, and that played a factor,
Speaker 1: he said, in him shutting the account down. He said,
Speaker 1: it's where his life is at least passionate about right now,
Speaker 1: and he said he didn't want to create more quotes,
Speaker 1: create more misinformation without having a true purpose. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: ball Sack Sports, at least Matt's version of it, and
Speaker 1: that's a key caveat here as well, no longer exists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: r I p boss ex Sports. I want to read
Speaker 1: one last thing that you had in your story. As
Speaker 1: Trailblazers guard Damian Lillard once said, I think we live
Speaker 1: in a world where a lot of morons can't tell
Speaker 1: if something is real or fake. Well, actually, Lillard didn't
Speaker 1: say that ball Sax Sports did. I think that sums
Speaker 1: it up and puts a nice button on it. From
Speaker 1: Matt from Ohio, no last name, no location, ball Sack
Speaker 1: Sports was fake and it's gone now. But Ben Pickman
Speaker 1: is here and he's the real deal. Ben. Thanks for this,
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot for having me. Hello Hey, Ben, this
Speaker 1: is Isaacally, producer at Sports Illustrative Weekly. You got a
Speaker 1: second of talk, absolutely absolutely awesome. So as I understand it,
Speaker 1: we have a little bit of an update for balsax sports.
Speaker 1: That's right, we do. We thought initially that baal sax
Speaker 1: sports was gone for good, but it turned out it
Speaker 1: was only gone for a full month. Matt deactivated the account,
Speaker 1: initially saying it had been a successful experiment and that
Speaker 1: it had run its course. But over the last ten days,
Speaker 1: ball sack sports has suddenly returned. Matt says he wants
Speaker 1: to use its platform not only to continue to create
Speaker 1: more harmless but humorous graphics, but also continued to discuss
Speaker 1: topics unrelated to sports, which was something he was doing
Speaker 1: for a little bit prior to deactivating the account in
Speaker 1: the first place. And uh, have you spoken to Matt
Speaker 1: since has happened? As he followed up with you at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we chatted earlier this week. When I asked him
Speaker 1: about why he brought it back. He started to explain that,
Speaker 1: you know, if he didn't want the account to lose
Speaker 1: all of its relevance and he felt like he still
Speaker 1: had a platform. Um, he felt more comfortable continuing to
Speaker 1: tweet about non sports topics on the account, and that
Speaker 1: was something that was kind of weighing on him prior
Speaker 1: to deactivating it. He also says now he's less focused
Speaker 1: on just growing the account than he once was um
Speaker 1: and that he's going to be more pick and choosy
Speaker 1: about when he's actually creating graphics and about what topics.
Speaker 1: So it's going to be a little more selective about
Speaker 1: what he's putting out going forward. All right, Ben, appreciate
Speaker 1: all your hard work on putting see Heather this very
Speaker 1: bizarre and fun story. Thanks a lot for Chatt and Isaac.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and a reminder to please rate and
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Speaker 1: stories and podcasts, visit SI dot com. This episode of
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrated Weekly was produced by Jessica Yarmoski, Jordan Rizzieri,
Speaker 1: and Isaac Lee, who was also our sound engineer, our
Speaker 1: senior producer is Dan Blue. Our executive producers are Scott
Speaker 1: Brody and me John Gonzaltz. Our theme song is by
Speaker 1: Nolan Schneider. If you've stuck around this long, we leave
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Speaker 1: Let's talk about it, Let's talk about Paul zas