This looks just a tad suspicious. The ESPN Stats & Info account posted a tweet on the Eagles running back situation that was eerily similar to a great tweet sent out by Will Brinson of CBS Sports that was RT’d over 6,000 times. The ESPN one just happened to come a few hours afterwards. How can anyone look at these two tweets and think one wasn’t taken directly from the other one?
.@ESPNStatsInfo really likes @WillBrinson's stuff. pic.twitter.com/vl6WKQn6Mr
— Evan Doherty (@YSportsEvan) March 12, 2015
For the record, after attention was brought to the similarities, @ESPNStatsInfo deleted their tweet and retweeted Brinson’s original. The CBS writer also said the account sent a private message to apologize, saying it was “accidental.”
FWIW the @ESPNStatsInfo DM’d me an apology and RT’d my original tweet. Accidental tweet on their part.
— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) March 12, 2015
How could that be an accident? It’s not exactly a manual RT gone wrong. The original tweet was changed just enough from Brinson’s original that it wasn’t exactly a copy/paste job. And the fact that Brinson couldn’t DM back the account makes it even weaker.
People steal things on Twitter all the time. And stealing jokes has been around a lot longer than Twitter has been alive. But you’d think the official ESPN Stats account would be better than a rip-off parody account of some Hangover character who spends their day swiping jokes from people with actual talent and humor.
UPDATE: And that’s not all. Apparently Jay Crawford read Brinson’s tweet without attribution on SportsCenter and was called out for it (as seen in this exchange with Michael David Smith). So maybe that’s where ESPN Stats & Info got their tweet from and this all began.
