Boardroom, Bleacher Report delete erroneous posts claiming Caitlin Clark outsold LeBron James in jersey sales

On the list of things that get rewarded on social media in 2026, being correct ranks fairly low.

Companies like Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok, and the rapid growth of AI, have incentivized speed, shock, and virality at the expense of accurate information. And as such, we’re inundated with errors, lies, and biased information that makes its way around the world before anyone’s had a chance to confirm whether it’s actually true.

That’s what makes aggregation such a sticky wicket. We do plenty of it here at Awful Announcing. As such, we know all too well how important it is to check your sources and not make assumptions just because a post goes viral. Otherwise, you’re liable to end up running with false information and embarrassing yourself in the process, especially if you try to draw conclusions from it.

A great example of that appears to have occurred this week, amid an erroneous report that Caitlin Clark had surpassed LeBron James in jersey sales.

Earlier this week, Boardroom and Bleacher Report both shared social media infographics claiming that the Indiana Fever star has officially surpassed LeBron James in basketball jersey sales and now ranks second overall among pro basketball players, behind only Steph Curry. The information was reportedly collected from Fanatics.

That’s a juicy data point, and the kind of thing that is destined not only to go viral but also to get aggregated into the sun. That’s exactly what happened as outlets like USA Today, People, The Big Lead, Sports Illustrated, Clutch Points, and Complex understandably ran with it. The data point is also primed to stoke certain confirmation biases, so outlets like OutKick and Breitbart used it to further their own narratives.

The problem? It’s not true. Or at the very least, it’s not a verified dataset.

On Friday, Boardroom posted on social media that they’d “learned that data was unverified and should not have been published or attributed to Fanatics or the NBA” and that they had removed the post.

A recent Boardroom social post claimed Caitlin Clark has outsold LeBron James in jersey sales since 2024. We have learned that data was unverified and should not have been published or attributed to Fanatics or the NBA. This post has since been removed.

— Boardroom (@boardroom) May 22, 2026

Bleacher Report also deleted its post, though it offered no explanation as to why.

Some of the aggregated write-ups have since been amended to note that the information is not correct. However, many of them have not, including the articles that used the data to make incendiary points about the WNBA or NBA.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that while an incorrect social media post about Caitlin Clark jersey sales might seem innocous, it can have a substantial ripple effect on the discourse, narratives, and the media ecosystem around it. Far fewer people will see the correction or deletion than saw the initial posts, and the same goes for the dozens of articles created in notable publications that presumed it was correct.

None of us can expect the modern media ecosystem to save us from our mistakes. Instead, it welcomes our mistakes and gladly feeds them to everyone else before we ever get a chance to correct them, presuming you even try to.