As someone who has been employed by mainstream media outlets for more than two decades—and who often opines on the intersections of sports, gender, politics, and race—Jemele Hill is more than used to receiving hate mail in response to her commentary.
She is, however, a novice at dealing with a new contour of being a public figure in the mid-2020s: receiving hate mail for something she didn’t write or say.
“I first noticed something was up last year when I started getting an influx of messages that were more vile than usual,” Hill told Awful Announcing in an interview this month. “I quickly found out there was a post circulating online that claimed I had said Angel Reese was the next Michael Jordan.”
Despite not recalling making such a statement—which Hill described as “absurd and extreme, even for [her] own history of provocative opinions”—she Googled herself, worried a recent comment could have been taken out of context. It hadn’t been.
Instead, Hill found that the quote was a total fabrication, first shared by a random sports page on Facebook, with no indication that it was untrue. The post’s comment section was already full of racial and misogynistic slurs when she jumped in from her personal account to set the record straight.
“You would expect in that situation, people would be contrite, apologetic, and say, ‘Hey, I got a little too emotional. I’m sorry,’” Hill recalled. “No. Instead, the response was, ‘Okay, maybe you didn’t say it, but it sounds like something you would say.’ That seems to be a common theme whenever I’ve checked people about falling for this clickbait; they have a hard time apologizing.”
Hill isn’t alone. Debunking viral fake quotes has become a Sisyphean (and near-weekly) task for celebrities of all kinds, though sports media personalities seem to be the preferred targets for this type of content—almost certainly because sports fans are known for being extremely engaged (and easily irritated) social media users.
View on Threads
It usually goes something like this: A fabricated quote is overlaid against a graphic designed to mimic the style of social media posts by legitimate sports outlets, like ESPN or Bleacher Report, and shared by a handful of obscure Facebook pages. (Hill believes—according to a private investigation conducted by two of her friends who are also public figures and experience this issue—that these pages are “likely connected” and part of an engagement farm network operating overseas.) The posts are then picked up by well-followed aggregator accounts and widely circulated across most other platforms, including X, Threads, and Instagram.
The quotes often have a racial, political, or otherwise divisive bent, which boosts their placement in algorithmic feeds.
“Rage is the best way to get engagement,” Ryan Clark, another popular fake quote target, told Awful Announcing. “These accounts know there’s a way to utilize a certain figure or situation to enrage people. Every fake quote of mine is about race.”
In the last month, the ESPN analyst has had to defend himself against viral posts claiming he said both Fernando Mendoza and Philip Rivers were benefiting from racial privilege. Other frequent fake quote subjects across sports media include Emmanuel Acho, Mina Kimes, and Jason Kelce. Athletes are not immune, either; a fake quote attributed to WNBA star Sabrina Ionescu became an X trending topic just last week.
“The strategy is so clear,” said Hill. “They take people who are already somewhat polarizing or who speak out on polarizing topics because they know it will get traction 100 out of 100 times. People either actually fall for it, or they realize it’s fake but still engage because they just want to be mad.”
While the aggregator posts frequently net millions of views, the real concern for targeted personalities is amplification by their peers.
“I don’t worry about trolls. I worry about these things getting picked up by legitimate media members and getting more legs,” Clark explained.
That fear became a reality for Hill last summer, when Stephen A. Smith—the biggest name in sports media—was asked about the false Angel Reese-Michael Jordan analogy on a podcast, setting off another wave of hate.
“I don’t blame Stephen,” Hill said of the incident. “But the fact that the quote even made it to him just shows how quickly and easily these things can circulate and get presented as fact.”
Despite the scale and persistence of the problem, social media platforms have offered little meaningful intervention.
“I’ve contacted people at the platforms through my producer at The Pivot. No one has gotten back to me,” Clark said.
Hill described a similar experience. “Meta will reach out to me about joining Threads or about monetizing their platforms,” she said. “But they never say anything about this.”
X’s Community Notes feature has emerged as a useful tool in identifying misinformation—including fake sports quotes—but it remains an imperfect safeguard. Many fabricated graphics still circulate for hours or days before receiving contextual corrections. And on other platforms, fake quotes often remain untouched, accumulating engagement indefinitely.
Hill and Clark believe action should be taken, with each pointing to an elimination of the ability to monetize fake content as the best possible remedy.
“Once you present a fake quote, you should be banned from making money off these social media sites through creator programs or ad dollars,” Hill said. “These accounts have every incentive to lie right now.”
Clark added, “You’re not going to get the people who own these handles to stop unless you stop paying them dividends.”
For now, neither Hill nor Clark said the fake quotes have materially impacted their employment or standing within the industry. Still, both have developed coping mechanisms for dealing with their new realities.
Clark blocks offending accounts liberally, describing it as a necessary measure “for [his] own sanity.” Hill is more selective with her engagement, typically intervening only when things become overwhelming. They each acknowledge that responding to every instance is impossible.
“The volume is just too great at this point,” said Hill.
Hill has discussed potential legal action with other public figures who have experienced similar issues, including the possibility of a class-action lawsuit targeting engagement farms and the platforms that enable them.
Clark, meanwhile, is skeptical that legal challenges would meaningfully slow the trend.
“I don’t think there’s an official framework to push back in that way,” he said. “The course is continuously changing, and, unfortunately, this is just par for the course now.”
Both personalities trace the start of their sagas to early 2025—a period that coincided with Meta ending its third-party fact-checking program, Elon Musk’s continued scaling back of moderation on X, and the rapid acceleration of AI-assisted content creation tools. The convergence of these forces has reshaped the sports media ecosystem, lowering the barriers to creating convincing misinformation while weakening the systems designed to stop it.
Amid such an environment, other forms of fake sports content have also flourished.
These range from playful and (mostly) obvious parody accounts like NBACentel to more purposefully deceptive pages that pose as league insiders, complete with legit-looking handles, bios, and profile pictures. And that’s to say nothing about the sports shitposting that has become standard content fare for prediction market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket.
The proliferation of fake sports news isn’t impacting the relationship between the professional sports world and platforms—yet. Case in point: Meta and X continue to net new partnerships with leagues of all kinds.
But questions remain about how this is all impacting the psyche of modern sports fans. Hill believes it’s for the worse, though she notes the trend is downstream of broader societal happenings.
“What’s being tapped into here is something we should all be concerned with—it’s the fact that our society is allowing people to live in their own reality versus actual reality,” she said. “And for sports fans, who often have such deep connections to athletes and teams, it’s so easy to play them emotionally.”
Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.
About Ellyn Briggs
Ellyn Briggs is a writer, reporter and researcher based in Columbus, Ohio. Her work and commentary are regularly featured by dozens of outlets, including NBC News, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Business Insider and Fast Company.