WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — Gene Keady was drinking a beer when rumors of his imminent death began to spread.
“Someone called me and said, ‘Is coach OK?'” Keady’s wife, Kathleen, said after Purdue’s Feb. 7 game against Oregon, which she attended with her husband. “I said, Yeah, we’re sitting here at the bar having a drink.”
The fib about the 89-year-old Purdue basketball coaching legend originated from a Facebook account called Boiler Court Report the Saturday morning of Jan. 31. The page, which has 4,500 followers and displays mascot Purdue Pete in its profile picture, had posted what it called an “emotional update” about Keady, claiming the former coach was under continuous medical care, purportedly quoting a family member. But in actuality Keady was, as someone close to him put it, “living his best life.”
As the false story racked up reactions, shares and comments, many sharing heartfelt goodbyes or promises of prayer, Keady’s family fielded calls from concerned friends all over the country.
Hannah Rodriguez, a 24-year-old Purdue alum who has known the coach all her life because of his close friendship with her father, was watching TV with her mother when the calls started coming. In the span of two days, 15 to 20 reached out.
One of Keady’s close friends, unable to reach the former coach by phone, was on the verge of buying a plane ticket to visit him for what he believed would be the final time.
The Keady post wasn’t a one-off. A perusal of Boiler Court Report’s activity is a trip to a world in which Purdue men’s basketball personnel hug sick children mid-game, sing the national anthem, smile from hospital beds, go on “The View” and confront the White House press secretary. The page’s details say it’s based in Australia and provide a phone number with a Cocoa Beach, Florida, area code.
There appear to be at least two other accounts affiliated with Boiler Court Report (Boilers Nation and West Lafayette Basketball Fans), posting identical, far-fetched content featuring what appear to be artificial intelligence-generated images of players and coach Matt Painter alongside the hallmarks of AI writing: rambling sentences saturated with melodrama and light on specifics. West Lafayette Basketball Fans posted the same false Keady update less than a week after Boiler Court Report, notching even higher engagement metrics.
Sensational Purdue sports news and AI’s endless capacity for invention make for a potent combination on the world’s most popular social media site: The three false accounts together combine for more than 15,000 followers.
“To me, this feels like it’s the work of an AI agent, which is like someone set up one of these large language model tools to automatically produce and then integrate with Facebook,” said Fahad Humayun, an assistant communications professor at the University of Evansville who studies AI use in sports news. “There’s no human supervision involved. They just gave them a template, and then it’s automatically generating Facebook posts.”
Humayun said the perpetrator is likely an individual who did not necessarily set out to flood fans’ feeds with falsehoods but saw a revenue opportunity in AI news generation on social media. They could have, in as little time as 30 minutes and for the cost of $20 per month, prompted AI models to create Facebook accounts that automatically post sensational updates on attention-grabbing subjects around the clock.
The accounts could have begun making things up when they ran out of real news to regurgitate. Just a few accounts wouldn’t generate enough advertising revenue to make the effort worthwhile, but Humayun said 200 such Facebook pages could make their owner a few thousand dollars per month.
Boiler Court Report alone usually produces three to five posts a day. In the seven days from Feb. 11 to 18, the page racked up 9,525 post reactions, 1,122 comments and 168 shares across 36 posts, which ranged in subject from false game time changes and lies about program legends contracting cancer to posts about players’ fictitious girlfriends.
“We know how awful social media is,” said senior forward Trey Kaufman-Renn, who has also been the source of rumors being spread. “I try as hard as I can to stay off of it. It’s been difficult with how the game has changed and NIL and how you have to brand yourself. After basketball, I won’t be on it at all.”
Humayun said fake news on social media is especially pernicious because it spreads faster than legitimate reporting.
A 2018 landmark study found fake news to spread six times faster than fact on the social platform now known as X, spurred mostly by real people who find the outrageous headlines share-worthy, as opposed to automated accounts called bots. The fake Purdue basketball news accounts seem popularized by the same innocent instinct: Most shares and reactions to their posts appear to come from Purdue alumni or Indiana residents — real fans.
“If I am on social media, and if I see that an 80-year-old coach is in the hospital, I would just leave it and scroll down,” Humayun said. “And maybe I would discuss it with my wife and my co-worker. If I’m really interested in that sports team, I might just reshare it.”
No easy solution
Social media companies have long grappled, mostly unsuccessfully, with curbing misinformation on their sites.
Facebook has a winding history with content moderation dating back to concerns about Russian election interference on the platform in 2016. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced in January that it would eliminate its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. because the company felt it was infringing on free speech. Now, Facebook’s 2 billion daily users rely on each other to police false content, in the form of community notes and account reporting options.
Humayun is skeptical that this approach can work.
“People disagree over community notes a lot, and then it depends on how many people agree on a viewpoint,” he said. “It’s kind of like Wikipedia. I mean, it’s useful to a point, but it’s not always facts.”
Andrew Forrester, a 37-year-old Purdue fan from Madison, Indiana, is one of 12 people who have negatively reviewed Boiler Court Report on Facebook.
He left his review — “all fake stories, it’s deceptive!” — minutes after Purdue basketball’s official account called for its followers to report and block Boiler Court Report on the afternoon of Jan. 31. Team information director Chris Forman had been in contact with Keady’s family as they worked to slow the spread of the false report.
“I bet I have reported 40 of their posts and nothing happens,” Forman said in a message. “We shared one from Purdue basketball and asked people to report it, and I bet 100 people reported posts and still nothing happened. I would just reiterate to people that the definitive word on information will come from our official accounts. And to think about the post and think, Is this really something that you think would happen?”
Meta’s content policing policy page says the company’s human reviewers prioritize reviewing posts on the basis of the content’s reach, ability to cause harm and the degree to which it violates the company’s community standards. Fake news posts in a community as relatively niche as Purdue basketball fandom may operate in a kind of gray area of urgency for the company.
And even if Meta takes action against accounts like Boiler Court Report, the ease of AI page creation means more could spring up in its place. Account identities can also be changed with ease: In August 2025, the account now known as Boiler Court Report went by the name Touchdown Tribe. It changed its name in December, according to Facebook’s “Page Transparency” information.
Forrester’s first encounter with Boiler Court Report came in January, when he saw a post attributing a fiery quote to senior point guard Braden Smith. It didn’t seem like something Smith would say publicly, and Forrester hadn’t seen any of his usual news sources report anything. Still, the post looked polished enough to be true at first glance.
“At first, it was written well enough that it made me go, ‘Oh, gosh, what is this?’ And then I saw the link, and I was like, that’s not a legitimate link.”
Forrester said he follows Purdue basketball closely enough to know where to look if he sees news that seems fishy. For instance, when he saw a false report on X from a reporter parody account that Kaufman-Renn had been dismissed from the team, he checked the accounts of beat reporters he follows, such as the Journal & Courier’s Sam King, IndyStar’s Nathan Baird and Gold and Black’s Brian Neubert.
“I immediately go to them, and if they aren’t posting about it, I’m like, well, it’s not true,” Forrester said. “So even if it gets me on its face, I know where to check.”
But for more casual fans, people accustomed to seeing the occasional update about Purdue while scrolling social media, the lies can be harder to catch. Forrester has had family members mention fake posts like the Keady one or those involving Smith to him, believing the updates are true.
Humayun doesn’t think AI content creation on social media is going anywhere. In fact, he envisions a future in which content is at least partially automated.
Given the inadequacy of current AI-detection software, he thinks accounts like those of Boiler Court Report are nearly impossible for social media platforms to stop. The onus, then, is on people to be able to spot artificially generated posts and decide not to pay attention.
Easier said than done.
“AI tricks me all the time,” Rodriguez said. “And I always look at my husband and I’m like, ‘Look how funny this video is.’ He’s like, ‘Babe, that’s AI.’ It’s like I need an AI class to decipher what’s real and what’s not, and I’m 24.
“Like, that’s a little ridiculous.”
Contact Israel Schuman at[email protected] or on X @ischumanwrites.
