Fact File: Fake stories about hockey stars tied to foreign clickbait network

A new NHL season is just around the corner, but hockey fans looking for updates on their favourite players and teams should be wary of news they see posted on Facebook from clickbait accounts sharing fake, often outrageous stories.

Anyone scrolling their feed earlier this month might have been surprised by a bit of “breaking news“: “Sidney Crosby has asked the NHL and all other professional sports leagues to observe a minute of silence before each game to pay tribute to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.” The post had 20,000 reactions and more than 1,000 comments, and was reshared on the X platform, formerly Twitter, where it got 36,000 likes.

The page that posted the story, Northern Netminders, described itself as an NHL news and updates page, “Bringing you the latest NHL news, trades, game highlights, and insider updates — all things hockey, all the time.”

The now-deleted post linked to an article that claimed the Pittsburgh Penguins captain made the statement on Sept. 10, the same day Kirk was killed at an event at a university in Utah. While there was an interview with Crosby posted that day on the team’s official website, it made no mention of a call for a moment of silence or of the killing.

Oilers fans may have been interested to see the page Northern Ice Kings making the same claim about that team’s captain, Connor McDavid. More of a Leafs fan? Leafs Legacy said both Auston Matthews and William Nylander made the same appeal. The page “Oilers nations” claimed that Ottawa Senators captain Brady Tkachuk called for the same moment of silence.

A search on Facebook found similarly worded posts about basketball, baseball and football players.

CLICKBAIT NETWORK

The Canadian Press found 18 Facebook pages operated from outside Canada posting clickbait hockey content, most of which was about Canadian players or teams. The pages had follower counts ranging from 5,700 to 21,000, and were created between March 2024 and April 2025.

None of the pages had managers in Canada, but all of them had at least one administrator in Vietnam, with the United States, Pakistan and the Philippines also listed for some.

Many of the pages posted the same content, or made identical claims about different players, with the apparent aim to drive traffic to websites loaded with ads featuring stories likely written with the help of artificial intelligence.

Nine of the 18 pages linked to websites that had domains registered in Vietnam, while the other pages had hidden their registration data.

Many of the posts included AI-generated images, such as one from June 19 claiming that Crosby had announced he and his partner were expecting their first child, with an AI-generated image of Crosby holding a sonogram. The Canadian Press could find no such official announcement from Crosby, but did find nearly identical posts made about several other players.

Social media content farms are nothing new, but a recent spate of celebrity clickbait pages has raised alarm among observers who point to Meta’s relaxed moderation practices as partly fuelling the boom in content.

Meta – Facebook and Instagram’s parent company – announced in January it would be winding down its partnership program with fact-checking organizations in the United States in favour of a community notes model similar to the one used on X.

When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Julia Perreira said by email that the pages flagged by The Canadian Press were removed for violating Meta’s policies.

The Canadian Press also reached out to the NHL for comment and will update this article if it receives a response.

DATA VOID

Fans looking to check these claims with more reliable sources faced a hurdle, as Google search’s AI Overview tool used some of these posts as sources for the summaries that appeared at the top of search pages.

This is what happened with the Crosby baby post, which was used as a source for a search The Canadian Press made in August, with the summary saying the couple were “expecting their first child, a boy, in December.” A search for other claims, including two searches about Florida Panthers player Matthew Tkachuk supposedly saying “The NHL was made for America,” brought up similarly misleading overview results.

However, another search about McDavid turning down a Tesla sponsorship was correctly deemed false in the AI Overview, which cited a lack of credible sources among its reasoning.

AI Overviews are designed to show information supported by high quality websites, but they run into difficulties if there isn’t any relevant, high quality information available, a Google spokesperson told The Canadian Press by email. That creates a “data void” that sometimes causes lower-quality information to appear.

The spokesperson said the overviews are dynamic and change based on the available information, and that the results The Canadian Press shared with the company are no longer appearing.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 22, 2025.

Colleen Hale-Hodgson, The Canadian Press