2019 Georgia football running back commit John Emery was is in the news for a fake tweet that spread around insisting that the five-star accepted bags of money from Georgia.
2019 Georgia football running back commit John Emery is in the news for the most unfortunate reason. A tweet from a fake Brett McMurphy account showed a screenshot of a tweet Emery allegedly deleted where he said that he was going to “commit to LSU before [Georgia director of player personnel] Marshall Malchow threw me [Emery] a bag of money.”
Instead of checking the spelling or even the amount of followers on the Brett McMurphy account, numerous websites and twitter pages ran with the tweet. Many Facebook pages, including a Georgia Tech fans page shared the stories from the websites.
There was no fact or source checking involved. No critical thinking of any kind. Just reading, reacting and posting. Just like you’re not taught in journalism school, and just like you’re told not to do at sports commentary websites.
(Edit: shortly before this story was published, the text is from the fake Brett McMurphy twitter account which was suspended.)
A high school student’s reputation, as well as the reputation of several professional adults was libeled by an obviously fake Twitter account that a bunch of my supposed colleagues were too lazy to check out.
I’ll give a shout out to The Heavy and their writer Jonathan Adams for being one of the first non-Georgia related sites to publish a story about the tweet being a fake. But such a story should have never needed to be written in the first place.
Emery, if he stays with the Dawgs, will be the second five-star back to sign with Georgia in two years and the fifth back ranked in the top six at the position in four years. Georgia has long been considered Running Back U, Kirby Smart is keeping that alive with players like Emery.