Are Washington’s NFL team secretly running a Twitter fan account, in an attempt to boost support for a team name derided by scores of Americans as ignorant and offensive?
That’s the question after a Twitter gaffe this past weekend that subjected the franchise to further mockery for its off-field activities.
A recap: on Sunday, during Washington’s 24-21 victory over the Chicago Bears, the team’s official @Redskins account sent an innocuous tweet about a touchback from a Bears punt. But then the exact same tweet was simultaneously published by “Redskin Facts”, an account said to be run by “passionate Washington Redskins fans and others who support the team’s use of its name and logo”.
— Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog) December 13, 2015
Pretty suspicious. It had already emerged that @redskinsfacts was managed by a PR team, and not the fans themselves, but did the double tweet expose a sham orchestrated by people within the franchise?
Washington insists not. In a statement on Monday, the team said: “Yesterday our social media team accidentally posted a Redskins-authored tweet to the third-party Redskins Facts account, which is an account founded by alumni players and supporters and managed by a DC public relations firm.
“It was a simple login error that was quickly corrected after the mistake was realized. Washington have never posted content to any of the Redskins Facts digital assets, which include a Facebook page, Twitter account, and website. Official Redskins authored content can be found at @Redskins on Twitter.”
But as Tom Ley on Deadspin put it: “Why on earth would the person who runs the official Redskins account also have the log-in info for this alleged third-party account if they never used it for anything?”
Quite so. Is something underhand going on?
In July, a federal ordered the cancellation of its federal trademark registrations, after upholding the earlier verdict that the name was “likely to disparage” Native Americans. Washington are appealing the verdict.
