When news spread of Sean “Diddy” Combs’s arrest on racketeering and sex trafficking charges on Sept. 16, Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson appeared to have gotten LeBron James’s take on the matter.
“It’s crazy, I was bumping to ‘Mo Money Mo Problem’ earlier today in the car and I had a weird feeling today was the day the feds will catch Diddy,” James supposedly said, according to @TheNBACentel, which credited the quote to Robinson.
The problem: The Lakers star never said it. And Robinson, a longtime NBA insider who is currently freelance, never reported that James said it.
The NBA Centel account parodies the basketball news aggregator NBA Central, which has 1.7 million followers and has been criticized for its own inaccuracy. NBACentel has 154,000 followers and despite disclosing in its profile that it is a parody, continues to fool many.
“Honestly, most of them at this point are hilarious because you know that it’s bullshit,” Robinson tells Front Office Sports. “But where it gets touchy for me and where it blurs the line on whether people think it’s real or b.s.—like when Diddy got arrested. My contacts in entertainment were texting me saying, ‘Congratulations for the quote from LeBron.’ I replied that I didn’t talk to LeBron at all about this.”
The fake news that gains traction from @TheNBACentel has led to a term that Merriam-Webster jokingly recognized this month: “centel’d.” The fact-checking website Snopes even weighed in on the James-Diddy tweet and gave it a “false” rating.
Getting centel’d involves duping people into believing, for example, a tweet that said Kevin Durant said he’s single because he’s “not dealing with the headache of debating ball with a woman who can’t name my MVP year or break down a pick-and-roll.”
LeBron comments on P Diddy getting arrested:
— NBACentel (@TheNBACentel) September 17, 2024
“It’s crazy, I was bumping to ‘Mo Money Mo Problem’ earlier today in the car and I had a weird feeling today was the day the feds will catch Diddy.”
(Via @ScoopB) pic.twitter.com/ujvOuJTqE3
“You got centel’d,” Durant responded from his official account. A few minutes later he posted: “Sometimes I wake up and look at @TheNBACentel comments just to truly see how many dummies come online thinking that they have high iq.”
Aggregator accounts have grown in number and prominence since Elon Musk purchased Twitter two years ago and rebranded the social media company to X.
As FOS previously reported, the change is due largely to the monetization program launched last year that allows subscribers who pay for X Premium to earn money from their engagement. That gives aggregators an incentive to push the envelope with the only backstop being Community Notes—a user-submitted correction system that demonetizes a post found to be false.
But fake aggregators like NBA Centel don’t get hit with a Community Note that often. That false James quote about Diddy still doesn’t have a Community Note to debunk its veracity, meaning the person behind the account profited off the nearly eight million views the post has so far garnered.
Pivot to Parody
FOS interviewed the man behind the account, who hails from Toronto, on condition of anonymity. Beyond his monetary gains from X, he says he makes more on promoting sports betting like the offshore betting company DPB Bet on his feed.
“Ballsack Sports inspired me and many other troll accounts on this platform,” NBA Centel says, referring to the popular fake sports news X account. “He was the first to truly embrace this style of content, which encouraged me to give it a try and have fun with it. I didn’t expect it to gain as much traction as it did. And yeah, it definitely evolved from the beginning.”
Ballsack Sports, which FOS profiled last year, saw its manufactured quotes from athletes and coaches boosted as actual news by ESPN, Fox News, and other outlets. The man behind Ballsack Sports sounded like a proud father when talking about NBA Centel.
“Centel has a knack for going viral consistently,” the Ballsack Sports founder, who wished to remain anonymous, recently told FOS. “I think you have those 5% of users that are well-versed on the inner workings of the basketball Twitter space and are ‘in’ on the joke. Then you have the rest of that 95% that probably aren’t as engaged with the app and so are more vulnerable to the bait.”
“I’ve seen time and time again users post screenshots of their friends, coworkers, and family getting ‘cracked,’ ‘sacked,’ or ‘centel’d,’” he added.
The account now known as NBA Centel started in July 2022, but it had a different handle and focused on regular, non-parody NBA tweets. Last year, the man behind the account says he pivoted to satire and began to gain traction.
Soon after it was rebranded NBA Centel, the account got Warriors forward Draymond Green to respond to a fake quote from Kevin Garnett in July 2023 on the feud between Green and Golden State teammate Jordan Poole.
“I tried you when I was a Rookie KG, and you started talking to yourself like I wasn’t talking to you,” Green responded in a now-deleted post. “What’s that like? The freshman picking on a senior citizen that’s double his size?”
Garnett replied that the NBA Centel quote was fake and asked Musk to “fix it.”
Spoofing Other Leagues
There are now other Centels on X for other sports, including the WNBA and NFL. The man behind the NBA Centel account, however, says those aren’t his.
“They are not run by me,” NBA Centel says. “I only manage @TheNBACentel. All the other ones are just copying me.”
The real NBA Central changed its handle in July 2023 from @TheNBACentral to @TheDunkCentral, but a rep for NBA Central—which also goes by Dunk Central on its website—tells FOS that wasn’t done in response to NBA Centel.
“We heard rumors saying Adam Silver sent the black SUVs,” NBA Central says. “We heard rumors saying Centel was the reason. None of it is true. We just didn’t want to have NBA in our brand name when it was time to expand since that’s a tricky situation with the NBA. We were just being proactive.”
NBA Central isn’t the only news aggregator that has spoof accounts using the same logo and a similar handle. Legion Hoops, an X account that covers NBA news with nearly 820,000 followers, has several pretenders on the platform.
“At first, I’m not going to lie, I didn’t like it,” Legion Hoops CEO Jacob Ortiz tells FOS. “The idea of someone mimicking my brand and spreading false news, and potentially even news that could be a bad look, concerned me. Occasionally, I’d message the pages to change, and they did. However, as time has passed, I stopped caring, and I just focus on being accurate on my own reporting and aggregation.”
NBA Central is also rolling with it.
You got centel’d…
— Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) October 14, 2024
“I don’t think it hurts,” NBA Central says. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You wouldn’t have a troll account if you’re not doing something right.”
NBA Centel says he stopped tagging actual NBA reporters’ X accounts—like ESPN’s Shams Charania and Chris Haynes—and now tags accounts that impersonate those reporters. The exception is Robinson, who says he’s “built a rapport” with Centel.
“No reporters have ever messaged me privately,” NBA Centel says. “They usually reply back to my tweets or quote it by saying, ‘It’s fake. I didn’t report this.’”
As the NBA regular season is set to tip off Tuesday, Ballsack Sports says the misinformation landscape is the new norm.
“It’s almost amusing at this point to see the same patterns of misinformation play out, and still going strong,” Ballsack says. “For some, it’s like, ‘Really? This is still happening in 2024?’ I think my guy [Kevin Durant] is one of those people. If it’s not happening in basketball Twitter, it’s always happening somewhere else in the social media space. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on who you may be, I don’t see much changing anytime soon.”
