NFL-Related Facebook Accounts Are Posting Some Of The Most Shameless AI Slop Ever
If you haven’t checked your Facebook account in a while, fear not, spam accounts are still very active. Now that the shocking and progressive AI keeps getting loose in their cache—and, more recently, football fans have to hunt.
There is a group of accounts on Facebook that claim to be a bunch of fan accounts of different National Football League teams. But a quick scroll through these pages, each sporting several thousand followers, reveals false information interspersed with a series of images that appear to be AI-generated. Based on the comment sections of these pictures and the amount of likes some of them are getting, people fully believe what they are posting.
“After His Desire to Return to the Steelers Didn’t Come True, Instead of Reacting with Anger or Anger, Former Player Chose to Resign and Join the Pittsburgh Police Department to “Wear the Pittsburgh Colors Again,” a Pittsburgh Steelers fan account with 11,000 followers wrote earlier this week. The post does not name the player but is accompanied by a photo that appears to have been produced. by AI former football player Adam Thielen recently announced his retirement, and played briefly for the Steelers late last year. He did not share plans to join the Pittsburgh Police Department.
One 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 is said to have died following a domestic violence incident and left behind a five-year-old child. Not only has Roark been doing well, he doesn’t even have children to begin with.
“You often see that happen, like high-profile celebrities,” Roark told the Denver Post. “For that to happen to me was really weird.”
The account was created in November and has now been closed by Meta after The Denver Post reached out for comment. Two months into its existence, the account reportedly circulated a number of false 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 while “Wild Horse Warriors” are now a thing of the past, similar accounts continue to flourish on Facebook. One such account, called “The Broncos Stampede Crew,” made a similar LGBTQ+ 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 AI-generated fake news about football players? While it cannot be confirmed how these particular accounts operate, the pattern seems consistent with what has long been used by spamming Facebook accounts. Each post from these fake fan accounts links to an article from a website posing as a reputable news organization such as “ESPNS” or “NCC News.”
“Spam pages mainly use the attention they get from viewers to drive them to domains outside of Facebook, probably in an effort to generate ad revenue,” Harvard researchers wrote in a 2024 study. These websites are often “content farms full of ads—some of which themselves appear to consist primarily of AI-generated text.”
Some pages may try to build up an audience and good ranking with the algorithm by using these fake clickbait stories for shock-value first, before completely changing the purpose of the page.
“It’s possible that these were bad pages that were trying to build an audience and later they’ll focus on trying to sell goods or link to websites with ads or maybe turn their topics into something completely political,” Georgetown researcher Josh Goldstein told NPR in a 2024 interview about AI spam accounts on Facebook.
