Fake news: Colts G Quenton Nelson didn't scream while plowing through Barry Church on Sunday
One of the most popular highlights from NFL Week 10 featured Indianapolis Colts rookie guard Quenton Nelson demolishing Jacksonville Jaguars safety Barry Church on a run play.
Colts Twitter highlighted Nelson on the play screaming in Church’s face as he cleared a path for running back Marlon Mack.
Nelson video went viral
The video was titled “Screaming Helps” and captioned “Quenton Nelson Mic’d Up” and has racked up more than 37,000 likes.
SCREAMING HELPS. pic.twitter.com/hYkcDAcXJ0
— Indianapolis Colts (@Colts) November 12, 2018
It turns out it was all a lie.
Well, the screaming part at least.
Nelson denies yelling on the play
Nelson told reporters on Tuesday that he did not yell on the play.
“I saw it got pretty viral on the internet, which was cool,” Nelson said. “I wasn’t yelling, not on that play. I don’t know how it got amped up like that.”
The Indianapolis Star reports that “the Colts video department added screaming into the video clip for fun.”
Not harmless fun in ‘fake news’ era
While the video was fun, and there are larger media concerns in the world than how an NFL team chooses to present highlights, it was a use of significantly poor judgment by the Colts social media team.
Twitter is the wild west of online information, where anything goes, and it’s up to the user to parse what’s real from what’s not. A video like this one doctored and presented as legitimate from an official source is troubling.
In a world where President Donald Trump’s White House screams “fake news” at legitimate reports that it doesn’t like while doctoring video footage of a tense moment with a CNN reporter to paint him as being physically aggressive with a woman in order to cut off his access, these kinds of decisions require extra care from social media producers.
Twitter is a platform for all kinds of fun content. The Nelson video was fun and would have been fine if presented for what it was — a clip with manipulated audio.
But it wasn’t. And that’s not OK.
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