Today we have a great example of the perils of a swirling rumor mill as we count down to Friday’s trade deadline.
A report on Tuesday from a reliable source, WEEI in Boston, reported on its Twitter account that the Red Sox had acquired Indians ace Cliff Lee. The only problem? It was a fake Twitter account, and the report was a hoax.
The story was spread before Rob Bradford, the WEEI reporter who supposedly broke the story, wrote on his actual Twitter account that “I have not reported anything. Somebody is hacking into my account.”
It turned out that it wasn’t that his account was hacked, but that someone created a realistic counterfeit page complete with WEEI logos and everything.
There are a lot of good sources of information out there, with one of the fastest and best being Rotoworld. We do our best to be both quick and accurate here, and both myself and Aaron dabble in the now-is-too-late world of Twitter.
But today’s incident is a reminder to us all to slow down just a bit.
