If you haven’t checked your Facebook account in a while, fear not, the spam accounts are still doing very well. Now with eerie and ever-advancing AI slop in their arsenal—and, lately, football fans to prey on.
There’s a group of accounts on Facebook that claims to be a bunch of fan accounts for various National Football League teams. But a quick scroll through these pages, each sporting a couple thousand followers, reveals misinformation paired with a series of seemingly AI-generated photos. Based on the comment sections of these photos and the amount of likes some of them get, people are fully believing what they post.
“After His Desire To Return To The Steelers Was Not Fulfilled, Instead Of Reacting With Anger Or Resentment, The Former Player Chose To Retire And Join The Pittsburgh Police Department To “Wear Pittsburgh Colors Once Again.” a Pittsburgh Steelers fan account with 11,000 followers claimed in a post earlier this week. The post does not mention the name of the so-called player but is accompanied by a seemingly AI-generated image of former football wide receiver Adam Thielen in 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 with an AI-generated image of Roark holding a child claimed that he had passed away following a domestic violence incident and left behind a 5-year-old child. Not only was Roark alive and well, he doesn’t even have kids to begin with.
“Usually you see that happen to, like, high-profile celebrities,” Roark told The Denver Post. “For that to happen to me was just really weird.”
The account was just created 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 reportedly disseminated a slew of misinformation posts about Broncos players as well, including a false claim that wide receiver Courtland Sutton refused to wear an LGBTQ+ solidarity armband during a game. But even though “Wild Horse Warriors” is 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 attached to that account appears to be based in Vietnam.
What do these accounts have to gain from fake AI-generated news about football players? While it’s not certain how these specific accounts operate, the pattern seems to fit what has long been utilized by Facebook spam accounts. Each post by these fake fan accounts links out to an article from a website that pretends to be a reputable news organization like “ESPNS” or “NCC News.”
“Spam Pages largely leveraged the attention they obtained from viewers to drive them to off-Facebook domains, likely in an effort to garner ad revenue,” Harvard researchers wrote in a study from 2024. These websites are usually “heavily ad-laden content farm domains—some of which themselves appeared to consist of primarily AI-composed text.”
Other pages could be trying to accumulate an audience and good standing with the algorithm by using these fake shock-value clickbait news stories first, before completely changing the purpose of the page.
“It could be that these were nefarious pages that were trying to build an audience and would later pivot to trying to sell goods or link to ad-laden websites or maybe even change their topics to something political altogether,” Georgetown researcher Josh Goldstein told NPR in a 2024 interview about AI spam accounts on Facebook.
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