On @NBACentel.
Lessons from the recently-suspended fake NBA News Twitter account.
Hello and welcome to the 5 new subscribers since my last email, in which I detailed how The Bill Simmons Podcast can take my advice on getting their video podcast to go viral. If you’re thinking of skipping this one because you don’t particularly care about the NBA or sports in general, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s really about the spreading of misinformation.
Worth mentioning that by the time I finished writing this, the Twitter account in question had already been resuscitated. But I think the larger point still stands, so I’m running it anyway.
Yesterday, NBA Centel (@TheNBACentel), a Twitter parody account that specialized in fabricating NBA news stories, was suspended.
The account’s name is a play on the far more popular account, NBA Central:
And here is a side-by-side of their respective profile pictures on X:
Launched in July 2022, NBACentel quickly gained a following for its satirical posts that mimicked legitimate news sources, similar to the parody account @BallsackSports.
But it’s more than just a Twitter account.
It’s an ongoing experiment in how easily false narratives can spread, and a reminder that even the people we trust to professionally verify information aren’t immune to the very mechanisms they claim to understand.
Beat writers who didn’t double-check a source, active players who took the bait:
Popular TV personalities who reacted to fake news live on air.
It’s easy to laugh at the people who “got Centel’d”, as Kevin Durant coined it.
But the real takeaway isn’t just that they got fooled.
It’s why they got fooled.
When I was in school, teachers drilled the importance of citing sources into my head.
Hell, I think I had a two-page bibliography in MLA Format for my D’var Torah.
Many people sensed what was coming with the internet, and the goal was to instill a habit of verifying where information comes from before presenting it as fact to others.
And yet, the moment we all logged on to social media, that instinct vanished.
Nobody bothers investigating if something is “actually” true anymore, the appearance of credibility is enough. If it seems legit, people take it at face value.
The NBA media ecosystem, like every media ecosystem now, isn’t designed for accuracy. It’s designed for speed, engagement, and spectacle.
And whoever is behind the NBA Centel account understands this as well as anyone.
I’m reminded of the common phrase said to brands all the time, back when I worked at TikTok:
Don’t make ads, make TikToks.
If a post looks native to the platform, if it “fits in” with everything else on a person’s feed, it will receive far more organic engagement.
Centel doesn’t write fake news. They write fake tweets.
The photoshopped infographics, the fake citations, the username juuust close enough to the “real” account that a reader’s eyes glaze over the spelling error. Their posts don’t feel like an intrusion into the timeline – they feel like part of the ecosystem.
We aren’t wired to fact-check everything in real time, Lexis Nexis simply doesn’t have the bandwidth.
Instead, we operate on trust. If something looks right, we assume it is right.
Only when something really triggers skepticism do we stop and question it.
And unless you’re already in the habit of questioning everything you read (which, unless you’re a cynical former Advertising major, you probably aren’t), a tweet that follows the format of all the other tweets you scroll past doesn’t raise any alarms.
When Centel falsely alleged that Dallas Mavericks GM Nico Harrison’s lower-third read “FINESSED BY ROB PELINKA” at the Mavs-Lakers game the other night after trading Luka Doncic to Los Angeles, it didn’t spread because people believe it’s real:
It spread because it fits a larger narrative that already exists.
That’s how misinformation works in 2025. It’s less about creating new narratives out of thin air, and more about reinforcing what people expect could be plausible.
If NBA Twitter collectively decides a player is lazy, a fake story about him missing practice because of a late night at a strip club will make the rounds online.
Because at the end of the day, people don’t share content because it’s true.