About a week and a half after the first cryptocurrency tout threw a bright green sex toy onto the Atlanta Dream’s court midgame, and was arrested a few days later because of the prank, a well-known basketball satire account chimed in.
On Aug. 9, the basketball parody account TheNBACentel posted a joke to social media: “All 13 WNBA teams are now required to install safety nets to protect against dildo-throwing incidents, per league officials.” It included an obviously doctored photo that showed a large net surrounding the court as players warmed up.
The British media personality Piers Morgan missed the joke and credulously shared the post with his nearly nine million followers. When he realized it was a prank, Mr. Morgan corrected the record, but by then it was too late: The misinformation machine was already churning.
Soon, a string of unconnected Facebook accounts that focus on sports, pop culture and politics began parroting TheNBACentel’s post, according to McKenzie Sadeghi, a researcher for NewsGuard, a company that analyzes the reliability of information online. With each iteration, the posts picked up more steam, with thousands of people sharing them.
Many commenters took the posts as fact, accusing the Women’s National Basketball Association of being humorless. Others took it further, adding sexism, racism and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. harassment to the mix. Some of the content, which quickly spread across all major social media platforms, echoed talking points about the league that are popular with right-leaning pundits, like the idea that the players don’t deserve to be paid more or mocking the quality of the game.
“I think we should begin throwing green Dildos at everything useless in America,” the right-wing commenter Kevin Smith wrote on X in a post that racked up nearly 350,000 views.
It was a case study in the kind of discourse that has plagued the W.N.B.A. of late. As the league continues to grow in popularity, netting record attendance over the past two years thanks in significant part to the arrival of superstars like Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever and Angel Reese of the Chicago Sky, what had been an occasional issue with targeted abuse has spiraled into a pervasive, leaguewide problem. Hate speech and misinformation, much of it boosted by right-wing media and perpetuated by profit-driven content farms, have joined forces to spin demeaning or harmful narratives about players.
And while all professional sports leagues receive some degree of hostile attention from passionate fans, the W.N.B.A.’s demographics mean attacks can be particularly nasty and very difficult to quell.
“The W.N.B.A. is a soft target because there’s been so many conversations along racial and gender lines about the league,” said Jemele Hill, a former ESPN pundit who now has a podcast blending sports and politics. She added, “When you have a league that is 70 percent Black, where a third of the women are queer and when you have all these combustible elements, then it makes it really easy for people to use that and weaponize that.”
Bethany Donaphin, a former player and the head of W.N.B.A. operations, said in an interview that the league began noticing “an uptick in vitriolic language and activity” on social media last year, coinciding with the arrival of Ms. Clark and Ms. Reese.
In response, the W.N.B.A. this season started a campaign it calls “No Space for Hate,” aimed at reducing noxious language. Now, before games, spectators see a message from Commissioner Cathy Engelbert asking for civility and respect. The league also improved its mental health offerings.
And before the 2025 season started, it offered players, their families and league personnel access to a tool called Social Protect, which uses artificial intelligence to delete hateful or abusive comments on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms. The app, which can be installed on mobile phones, is also used by the sporting body governing rugby in Australia.
In interviews, players said that, if anything, toxic and abusive content — not to mention impersonations using A.I. and even death threats — had only increased this year despite the league’s anti-hate campaign.
“I don’t think the league has done enough,” said Sami Whitcomb, a veteran guard for the Phoenix Mercury, who face elimination from the W.N.B.A. finals on Friday night in their game against the Las Vegas Aces. She said she had elected not to use Social Protect, claiming she had heard from teammates that it wasn’t as effective as they had hoped.
Ms. Donaphin acknowledged that many players had not taken advantage of the A.I. tool, but declined to state how many. “There’s a lot more we have to learn,” she said.
According to Shane Britten, the founder and chief executive of Social Protect, the company has deleted more than 350,000 comments from social media accounts belonging to the league, its teams and players this season.
“When you look at the level of hatred and personal attacks and everything that’s contained in that, it’s really staggering,” said Mr. Britten, noting that 11 of 13 teams in the W.N.B.A. used the app for their official accounts this year and he expects far more players to try out the technology next season. (Ninety percent of the league’s rookies used the service this year, according to Mr. Britten.)
DeWanna Bonner, a teammate of Ms. Whitcomb, said her inbox and direct messages were often filled with “awful, awful things.”
“We’re here to play basketball,” she said. “And it sucks that it gets taken away by all these narratives that have been created.”
Kate Starbird, who played two seasons in the league before getting a doctorate, now studies misinformation at the University of Washington. She said many of those narratives were promulgated — if not created — through profit-driven content factories. She hasn’t studied W.N.B.A. content specifically, but what she has seen on her own social media platforms fits a familiar pattern.
“They are trying to take advantage of this attention that they can gain from this moment the W.N.B.A. is having,” she said. “Some people care about it for the politics of it. Some people care about it because they know that political angle gets more attention and can be leveraged for more clickbait.”
Much of the content has revolved around Ms. Reese and Ms. Clark, whose on-court battles in college helped drive the 2024 women’s N.C.A.A. tournament to higher ratings than the men’s tourney for the first time.
When they got to the W.N.B.A., the league seized this built-in story for marketing purposes, but the narrative quickly got out of hand, with fans directing racist remarks toward Ms. Reese and other Black players who were perceived as bullying or targeting Ms. Clark. (Ms. Reese and Ms. Clark did not respond to requests for comment.)
Yet when asked about the simmering issue in a cable television interview late last season, Ms. Engelbert, the league’s commissioner, appeared to double down, stating that “you need rivalry, that’s what makes people watch,” and celebrating the fact that “there’s no more apathy” in the W.N.B.A. Her comments, which she later apologized for, led some to believe that she thought the hateful remarks directed at many players were a minor price to pay for the league’s increased visibility.
Marisa Parham, a professor of digital studies at the University of Maryland, noticed the rise in toxic content after attending a Los Angeles Sparks game last season. Her Facebook feed was flooded with what appeared to be A.I.-generated fake news about the W.N.B.A., often originating in foreign countries. Much of the content revolved around the two rising stars.
“The primary thing that was most noticeable was sort of this notion of Clark having been wronged,” Ms. Parham said. “That whenever she was not in the spotlight, this was evidence of wokeness, it was evidence of bias.”
Much of that content appeared to springboard off viewpoints that had been steadily gaining traction in right-wing circles.
Over the past two seasons, the W.N.B.A. — long ignored by right-leaning pundits except when they took time to ridicule women’s sports entirely — has become a favorite topic of discussion. And even though both Ms. Clark and Ms. Reese missed large portions of the current season because of injuries, podcasters and pundits including Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Dave Portnoy continue to talk about them, framing many discussions around race, either subtly or much less so.
“The WNBA investigates anti-black racism even as some of its players engage in anti-white racism against Caitlin Clark,” Mr. Shapiro posted in May, referring to a league investigation into racist comments that Ms. Reese said had been directed at her during a game in Indiana. The league could not substantiate her allegation.
Ms. Clark has tried to downplay the dynamic, stating last season that “people should not be using my name to push those agendas.”
“It’s disappointing,” she added. “It’s not acceptable.”
Ms. Reese has, in interviews, blamed the discourse on racism and described being targeted with death threats, strangers coming to her home and family members receiving A.I.-generated nude photos of her.
Clay Travis, the Trump-supporting founder and host of “OutKick,” a right-leaning daily podcast that mixes sports and politics, said the league had created some of its problems by trying too hard to satisfy its longtime, mostly female fan base and ignoring the much broader audience watching the game today. Mr. Travis and others point to the league’s pro-L.G.B.T.Q. stance, its strong support for the Black Lives Matter movement and the players’ union’s strong support of undocumented immigrants during recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles as proof that the W.N.B.A. is hostile to conservatives.
“I think the W.N.B.A. is without a doubt the most political of the sports leagues right now, and I think that’s by design,” Mr. Travis said. “I’ve joked that the only place Trump would get booed at is the W.N.B.A. all-star game.”
Click farmers are generally agnostic to politics, but their drive for profits often pushes their content into rage-bait and other divisive posts, Dr. Starbird said. Rather than originating new topics, they often try to piggyback off themes that are already resonating online, amplifying them considerably as they chase monetizable engagement.
For instance, two days before the first fake post about dildo-proof nets, Donald Trump Jr. shared a meme showing President Trump throwing a sex toy from the White House onto a W.N.B.A. court.
Ms. Sadeghi’s analysis of the flurry of posts around the dildo-proof nets indicated that they had originated from many unrelated accounts.
“They posted the claim at different times, are run from different countries, have distinct followings and cover varied topics,” she said in an email. “It’s likely that many of them picked up the post organically by monitoring similar pages, a dynamic we frequently observe among pages that track and mimic trending content.”
Brittney Griner is another case in point. When the star center was released in a prisoner swap after a 10-month detention in Russia in 2022, she dominated the political news cycle for days. But amid the legitimate coverage, NewsGuard found 40 accounts publishing false claims and other misinformation about Ms. Griner’s newfound freedom. Much of it incorporated A.I. right-wing voices, claiming that the government had negotiated her release only because she is Black and gay, while leaving other, white, Americans in Russian prison.
That swirl of conversation helped generate more insidious content about Ms. Griner that attacked her sexuality and appearance using homophobic tropes as well as fabricated content claiming she is transgender.
The unwieldy world of fake news is something the league office has yet to tackle.
“It’s an important issue that I think it takes more than just one technology solution to address,” Ms. Donaphin said.
Jackie Young, an all-star guard for the Aces, said that she increasingly tried to stay off social media to avoid the onslaught of negativity, which she characterized as a distraction from playing as well as she can.
“At the end of the day, we’re human beings,” she said. “It’s crazy the things that people say behind the phone.”
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times.
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