LeBron James leaving Miami Heat fake story catches everyone on Twitter
For a few minutes Thursday, several people were fooled by a fake Twitter story saying LeBron James was leaving the Miami Heat.
One of the many Adrian Wojnarowski fake/ripoff accounts that thrives on screwing with people sent out two tweets Thursday about James leaving the Heat.
The Miami Heat have been informed by LeBron's agent that LeBron will not resign with team, league sources tell Y! Sports.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojiYahooNBA) July 3, 2014
LeBron will meet with Rockets, Suns, Sixers. Rockets are his preferred destination, sources tell Y!
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojiYahooNBA) July 3, 2014
The first tweet about LeBron supposedly telling the Heat he is leaving had over 450 retweets at the time of this writing. The fake account does a good job of impersonating Wojnarowski, too; they use his name, avatar and even have a blue check mark next to the handle, making it look like a verified account. But the account is clearly fake as it has only around 1,000 followers and has only sent 30 or so tweets, compared to thousands for the real Wojnarowski.
We can’t go too hard on everyone who was fooled; we’ve screwed up before and even published a Terrell Owens story a while ago that stemmed from a fake account. But it goes to show how things get carried away these days. Big-time writers like Bomani Jones and Joe Posnanski retweeted the fake tweets. Even Yahoo!’s NBA blog was fooled by the fake Woji account.
Since we’re on the subject, I’m 99 percent certain LeBron isn’t leaving the Heat. He has no reason to. He just needs Pat Riley to improve the roster, which they did in the draft. And even if LeBron were leaving, he wouldn’t have had his agent inform the team. He would have gone out and met with teams and considered his options first before announcing a decision.
