Monday morning, interest in Instagram influencer Hayden Hopkins took hold across social media as the story of her pregnancy started making the rounds. Specifically, the key details that the 26-year-old was pregnant with the child of 69-year-old boyfriend Mark Davis, owner of the Las Vegas Raiders.
The cursory details made sense. Hopkins had been spotted in Davis’s luxury box during a Raiders game in 2022. People figured out who Hopkins was and kept tabs on her under the presumption that she and Davis were an item, even though she said that the Raiders owner was just “my neighbor/friend.” When she announced her pregnancy four weeks ago, the obvious assumption many made was that Davis was the father. Throw in the very Game of Thrones-y detail that Davis does not have any children, which would make this child the heir to the Raiders, and you have all the makings of a great story.
Alas, like so many stories, it wasn’t true.
Hopkins took to social media Monday evening to verify that Davis was not the father of her child and that she was simply a guest in the owner’s box, not his date or girlfriend.
— Hayden Hopkins (@haydenhopkins) May 27, 2024
What was noticeable about the news cycle on this report was the way that outlets had been reporting Hopkins as Davis’s girlfriend as if that were factual. A deleted X post by Dov Kleiman that went viral on Monday referred to her as his “girlfriend.” The Daily Loud also referred to her as Davis’s girlfriend. The same goes for large X accounts such as WorldStarHipHop, Robert Littal, and Wall Street Silver. Pat McAfee even mentioned it as a factual thing on Monday’s episode of RAW.
Someone forgot to tell Pat the Mark Davis rumor isn't true… pic.twitter.com/GIQCrR2JO4
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) May 28, 2024
Beyond that initial photo of Hopkins in Davis’s suite, there wasn’t actually any factual reporting to say they were dating. So how did that become such an undeniable piece of information by the time Monday rolled around and the story reached critical mass?
In the days after Hopkins’ announcement, websites and social media accounts started discussing the story and quite a few of them skipped past the formality of questioning their relationship and just presumed the two were together. Essentially Sports referred to her as “Mark Davis’s girlfriend” on May 14. A May 16 post on Barstool Sports was pretty forthright in its assessment of their relationship. A May 16 OutKick post also did the same. And there were plenty of social media posts on X, TikTok, and Instagram that discussed Hopkins as his girlfriend and Davis as the father of the child. It felt like the kind of thing people wanted to be true, so it became true.
So by the time we got to Monday and the story broke through into the mainstream echo chamber, enough people with some semblance of respectability had laid the track that Davis and Hopkins were dating and this was their child that it was being reported as a foregone conclusion.
All of which is to say this story should be the latest in a long series of reminders not to take the information you see online as factual until it’s either proven or credible journalists have a say (and even then…). And just because a social media account has a lot of followers or a website has a huge following, that doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
