A since-deleted message board submit from the favored unbiased Clemson web site Tigernet.com made the rounds Sunday night courtesy of the satirical social media account “Message Board Geniuses,” claiming star Clemson QB Cade Klubnik had been concerned in a automobile accident close to campus and couldn’t transfer his arm or shoulder.
The submit was bogus, Cade’s mom Kim Klubnik instructed CBS Sports activities when reached by way of textual content message.
“Fortunately, it’s faux information,” she stated. “Cade is okay!”
A preseason All-American, Klubnik will likely be one of many foremost characters of the 2025 faculty soccer season — the star quarterback for school soccer’s No. 4 total group, which opens the season Saturday in a titanic residence battle vs. LSU. However that movie star doesn’t make it OK for his well being to be made right into a joke on-line, both by an nameless troll poster or unfold by an nameless account that provides gas to stated troll posters.
In a social media panorama that’s more and more fraught with phony data, dupes, AI-generated pictures and the like, unhealthy data can have actual penalties. Klubnik’s household needed to cope with the actual penalties of that.
“My coronary heart has not stopped racing since somebody shared the story with me,” Kim Klubnik. “How can somebody be so merciless?”
That is the second time throughout fall camp during which a famous person quarterback had an damage rumor go viral. It beforehand occurred with LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier, whose knee tendonitis was a torn ACL within the unverified rumor mill that’s message boards and social media.
Nussmeier’s knee did get banged up. These within the LSU program have been baffled with how a minor knee damage — at a follow that wasn’t open to the general public — might flip right into a maddeningly inaccurate recreation of phone on social media.
There was no Klubnik automobile crash, although. And outdoors of a ban and a block, nothing will occur to whoever poster “JacobyMoore” is, who spun fairly a yarn that caught fireplace on social media. Clemson followers will need to have recognized him as a South Carolina fan trolling their board, as a result of that they had already began tongue-in-cheek retaliation posts about “Beamer automobile accident,” referring in fact to rival Gamecocks coach Shane Beamer.
“How can it’s OK to unfold rumors like this?” Kim requested.
