Fake News Blog Post

To preface I must say that I am a huge Manchester United fan. Sir Alex Ferguson is one of the greatest soccer managers of all time, and he managed Manchester United from 1986–2013. He retired in 2013 and he is 82 years old.

I saw a post on Threads the other day announcing that Sir Alex Ferguson would return to Manchester United and become their next manager. Seeing that he has been retired for 11 years this was obviously a fake post, but I decided to re-post it.

The post got a good amount of traction, with 32 replies and 210 likes. Additionally, I sent it to some of my friends by text. A couple of my friends thought that the story was true, and they were surprised, however, the more intelligent ones could tell that it was fake.

It is usually pretty easy to spot a fake post that is probably posted by a bot, not a real person. These posts typically have some weird emoji associated with the post and usually a link that takes you to an external website. The link associated with this post takes you to an unrelated article about Sir Alex Ferguson.

The comments on this post were quite entertaining as most people were making fun of the perspective move calling out how fake the post was. Some of the people who commented thought this was real. It seemed people in older demographics thought the post was real.

There are plenty of sports accounts on X, Threads, and Instagram that spread false information about sports, and some are satire. However, not everyone can spot fake news.