This past Thursday and Friday, we had a wonderful example of both the power of Twitter in 2013 and the way that Football has sold it soul to a media that laps up everything to do with it, no matter how dubious the source.
@BBCSporf is a classic example of a parody twitter account. It has nothing to do with the BBC, but uses a similar logo to con people into believing the “news” they post may have so truth to it. It doesn’t, of course. It’s all jokes and made up stuff. They readily admit that. Their aim is to make you smile. And usually they succeed. Always entertaining, if you like sport but don’t follow them, you should.
At 7PM on Thursday evening, this tweet appeared in my feed.
Well, that’s clearly a joke. A player being chased by Man Utd, Arsenal & Liverpool is about to rock up at bottom of the table QPR? Yeah, right. Still, you can see the number of times this got retweeted. And with other people picking up on it and using the hashtag, it wasn’t long before “SneijderToQPR” was the number one trending topic in the UK.
Then, we get this…
Really? Really? No, that’s a joke, right? Channel 4 News aren’t that stupid as to believe this was real, are they?
By 9PM, we get this from Sky Bet…
So that’s two major media organisations that have picked this up and either through lazy journalism or sheer stupidity, have believed there’s some truth in it.
But it gets worse. National “newspaper”, The Sun, ran the story on their back page on Friday morning.
Of course, The Sun claimed it was genuine and they had quotes from Harry Redknapp to back it up. But the quotes from Harry were in response to a question he was asked about this after the fake storm had broken on Twitter. And besides, Harry’s quotes were basically a diplomatically worded, “You’re joking, right?”
And finally, the story appears on the actual BBC’s website, with a classic quote from the player’s agent.
So there we have it. One joke tweet is picked up by media organisations that should know better. But it involves, football, and more specifically, the media’s favourite topics, Harry Redknapp and a London based club.
You couldn’t make it up. Except, of course, someone did. The original tweet, that is. The rest is all true. Sad, but very, very true.