It’s 12:36 AM and everyone’s phones start buzzing. ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania posted a trade update to his social media accounts. But the trade was so unexpected that many didn’t believe that it was real. The trade that sent Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis, Max Christie, and a first-round draft pick felt so far-fetched that it had to be fake.

The immediate reaction by many was that there was no way that a team would trade away one of the best players in basketball in his prime for a package that didn’t include a king’s ransom of draft picks. The pushback on the validity of the trade was so fierce that it prompted speculation that Charania’s X account was hacked. The noise was so loud in fact that he had to issue a clarifying post that he wasn’t hacked and that the trade was indeed “1000% real”.

The fact that Shams had to clarify that he was not hacked and that the trade proposal was indeed factual, says a lot about the magnitude of the trade. But it also sheds a light on the nature of sports reporting and breaking news through social media. In a world of compromised accounts and parody accounts desperate for clout, our minds went to skepticism immediately. This moment in time is a snapshot of how the landscape of social media in the sphere of sports has changed so much in a few short years.

The Deterioration of the All-Important Blue Check

For many years, stories were broken through radio and the newspaper. These mediums were eventually supplanted by television. In the internet age, breaking news started to be reported online. This was then supercharged when we started carrying computers in our pockets. Smartphones accelerated the social media era with apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram becoming installed on everyone’s phone.

Twitter as a microblogging platform, quickly became the go-to platform for many journalists. As it was primarily text-based, it allowed journalists and reporters to share a quick update and then link to their work easily. This was an efficient way to get the story to readers and followers quickly without having to tune into TV or other media.

The downside of this is that because these apps were free and focused on growth, anyone could make an account and say that they were a notable figure to quickly amass followers. This ultimately culminated in a lawsuit from St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRusa over an account impersonating him.

The answer to this was the Twitter verification badge, affectionately known by many as the “blue check”. This badge lived next to the username on the platform and let people know that the information from an account was coming from a trusted source. The process was not perfect, but it ultimately gave badges to public figures and notable journalists before expanding verification to the public in later years if they could prove to be a noteworthy person. This was an excellent tool for bloggers and YouTubers to get verified once they had established a significant following.

What verification did was to offer legitimacy to the concept of microblogging and turned sites like Twitter into the proverbial internet town square that it aspired to be. By knowing who was verified and who wasn’t fans were able to know who to follow while higher profile accounts were now able to have a direct line of communication with their fans. Sports fans would often follow their favorite insiders like Charania, Adam Schefter, and Jeff Passan to be able to see when players were on the move or other breaking news happening in the sports world. This all changed when Elon Musk took over Twitter.

When the billionaire bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, he promised to make sweeping changes to combat spam accounts and promote free speech, among other things. One of those other things was revamping the way that verification worked. Instead of verifying notable newsmakers, Musk introduced a paid model, giving anyone with a premium subscription a blue check mark. For those notable accounts that did not want to pay for a subscription, they had their verification taken away.

Many high-profile users scoffed at the notion of paying for Twitter and did not pay for X Premium (another change that Musk made was to rebrand Twitter to X). This moment created an opportunity for those that were looking for internet notoriety and the potential for payouts from X after Musk also introduced a revenue sharing program for verified users. There was now money to be made from impersonating users on social media.

Fake Accounts

To fully understand the gravity of a fake account, consider how many people in 2025 learn about breaking sports news. In the past, this was done on shows like ESPN’s SportsCenter or reported in a newspaper. In the early days of the internet, it was by using an RSS reader for your favorite websites and blogs. But today it is done through platforms like X through real-time updates.

With verification now eligible to anyone with a credit card, it was easy to copy the profile of an insider and pretend to break news. This was an easy way to get a lot of engagement, which would then help to contribute to earning money from posting on X. This eventually led to Musk and the X team to roll out a feature requiring accounts to disclose if they were a parody of a real person or not. But after a certain point, the damage is done.

This change had a separate ripple effect in the sports section of the internet. Aggregator accounts, like NBA Central or ML Football became popular as they reposted content from news breakers in one place for their followers. These accounts help to get the news out but have also been criticized for not crediting the original news breaker or even posting erroneous information. Popular personalities like Mina Kimes and Diana Russini have been openly critical of these accounts, as they make the job of a sports reporter that much more difficult.  

In the never-ending quest for engagement on social media, a different breed of accounts has been created: aggregator parody accounts. One of the most popular examples of this is “NBA Centel”, a parody of the NBA Central aggregator account. The best way to describe these parody accounts is that they are like The Onion but for sports and not easily distinguishable from their non-parody counterparts.

Centel has become so popular that NBA stars like Kevin Durant repost their content by saying “you got Centel’d”. While it is good for a laugh online, there is a danger that comes with these sort of parody accounts that continue to dupe people. While the account clearly lists on its profile that it is a parody account, most people simply will not look at a profile to verify that information. The result is a second guessing of what is real and what is parody-driven engagement farming.

For reporters like Shams Charania, these accounts add another complexity to a job that is complex enough as it is. There is a very real culture of misinformation on the internet, especially as it pertains to sports because it is easy enough to pretend to be a reporter, as it is a low stakes impersonation. But it creates a world where we must second guess every report before knowing that it is real or not.

And this is exactly what happened in the case of the Luka Doncic trade. It felt like a Centel post, or at the very least a post from someone trying to get a few thousand views by pretending to be the biggest NBA insider for a few minutes. It causes us to approach any sports news with doubt and skepticism, forcing us to continuously ask “is this even real”?

The solution would be to bring back verification, but it seems rather unlikely that this will happen as X continues to try and lure in new subscribers. Its competitors also seem to be unwilling to introduce verification now. Threads, Meta’s microblogging platform, also uses a paid badge system with Meta Verified that spans its various social apps. Blue Sky, the upstart platform that has gained steam recently, has no current way to offer verified accounts for its users.

As with many things in the social media age, change happens fast and eventually we all adapt. A layer of skepticism seems to be the new normal when it comes to any sort of breaking news for signings, trades, and the like. It’s an unfortunate reality that takes away from the initial excitement of a big trade in the NBA and other sports. Just remember to double check the username before you get too excited about a ludicrous trade that has been reported.