There are a group of accounts on Facebook that claim to be a group of fan accounts of various National Football League teams. But a quick scroll through these pages, each of which has a few thousand followers, reveals misinformation accompanied by a series of AI-generated photos. Judging by the comment sections of these photos and the amount of likes some of them have received, people are completely believing what she posted.
“After his desire to return to the Steelers was not fulfilled, rather than react with anger or resentment, the former player chose to retire and join the Pittsburgh Police Department in order to “wear the colors of Pittsburgh once again.” A post earlier this week claimed to have a Pittsburgh Steelers fan account with 11,000 followers. The post does not mention the name of the alleged player, but it is accompanied by an AI-generated image of former football wide receiver Adam Thielen in a police uniform. Thielen recently announced his retirement, and briefly played for the Steelers late last year. He has not shared any plans to join Pittsburgh law enforcement.
Another such account, a Denver Broncos fan account with more than 6,000 followers called “Wild Horse Warriors”, found a victim not in a player, but in Broncos reporter Cody Roark. A post featuring an AI-generated image of Roark holding a child in his arms claimed that he died after a domestic violence incident, leaving behind a 5-year-old child. Roark was not only alive and well, but he also had no children.
“Usually you see that happen with high-profile celebrities,” Roark told The Denver Post. “It was really weird for this to happen to me.”
The account was created back in November and has now been shut down by Meta after The Denver Post reached out for comment. In its two-month existence, the account allegedly circulated several misinformation posts about Broncos players, including a false claim that wide receiver Courtland Sutton had refused to wear an LGBTQ+ solidarity armband during a game. But even though “Wild Horse Warriors” are now a thing of the past, similar accounts continue to proliferate on Facebook. One such account, called “Broncos Stampede Crew”, made the same LGBTQ+ armband claim about Broncos quarterback Bo Nix. The phone number associated with that account appears to be located in Vietnam.
How will these accounts benefit from fake AI-generated news about football players? Although it is not certain how these specific accounts operated, the pattern matches one long used by Facebook spam accounts. Each post from these fake fan accounts links to an article from a website pretending to be a reputable news organization such as “ESPNS” or “NCC News.”
“Spam pages attracted the attention of large audiences by driving them to domains outside Facebook, presumably in an effort to garner advertising revenue,” Harvard researchers wrote in a 2024 study.
Other pages may try to accumulate audiences and good standing with the algorithm by using these fake shock-value clickbait news stories, before completely changing the purpose of the page.
Georgetown researcher Josh Goldstein told NPR in a 2024 interview about AI spam accounts on Facebook, “It could be that these were nefarious pages that were trying to build an audience and later try to sell stuff or link to ad-laden websites or maybe change their topics to something completely political.”
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