A since-deleted message board publish 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 automotive accident close to campus and couldn’t transfer his arm or shoulder.
The publish was bogus, Cade’s mom Kim Klubnik advised CBS Sports activities when reached through textual content message.
“Fortunately, it’s faux information,” she mentioned. “Cade is ok!”
A preseason All-American, Klubnik can be one of many foremost characters of the 2025 college football season — the star quarterback for college football’s No. 4 general workforce, which opens the season Saturday in a titanic dwelling 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 offers gas to mentioned 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 true 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 wherein a celebrity quarterback had an damage rumor go viral. It beforehand occurred with LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier, whose knee tendonitis become 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 apply that wasn’t open to the general public — may flip right into a maddeningly inaccurate sport of phone on social media.
There was no Klubnik automotive 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 should 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 automotive accident,” referring of course to rival Gamecocks coach Shane Beamer.
“How can or not it’s OK to unfold rumors like this?” Kim requested.
