Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever continually put up hugely impressive viewership numbers, setting records for WNBA television ratings. But they aren’t quite ready to surpass the NFL, at least not yet.
However, that hasn’t stopped fake news about the drawing power of Clark and her team from going viral.
The AI era is upon us and the results are pretty depressing for real life people who actually produce content for a living. One of the world’s biggest, most powerful, and most influential companies in Google has recently incorporated AI into their searches. And the results don’t only mean a huge decrease in visits for websites, but also a proliferation of inaccurate information that can easily make its way to the masses.
And in this case, it’s record ratings for Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever that are on par with the NFL.
It all started with a fake troll account on X that admittedly looks very official. @TheIndianaFever posts a combination of real and fake news, but is labeled as a parody account. On Monday, the account shared a ridiculous statistic that the Fever-Liberty game this past weekend drew 20.9 million viewers, complete with a very legitimate looking graphic. The tweet has 1.3 million views.
The Indiana Fever vs. New York Liberty game was the most-watched game in WNBA history, with 20.9 million viewers.
(via: @WNBAonESPN) | #IndianaFever #WNBA pic.twitter.com/2xobVkDfyq
— Indiana Fever ® (@TheIndianaFever) June 16, 2025
As of Tuesday morning, the real viewership number hasn’t been released. However, 20.9 million viewers immediately doesn’t pass the smell test. It would be an eight-fold increase on the most watched WNBA regular season game since 2000, which was set last month in a game between the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky on ABC at 2.7 million viewers.
That viewership number would also put it on par with The Oscars, the Presidential Debate, and several Sunday Night Football NFL telecasts as far as most watched television events go.
But in spite of being obviously wrong, it hasn’t stopped the news from spreading like wildfire.
The greatly inflated viewership number has been shared by multiple websites including ClutchPoints and Yahoo Sports. The Indianapolis Star appears to have fallen for it as well, as a story talking about the record rating has been deleted from its website. But a syndicated article on MSN with the story still exists.
But that’s not all, keeping the fake news front and center is Google AI, which places the 20.9 million viewers figure from the parody account at the top of searches related to the topic.
A Twitter parody account claimed that a regular-season WNBA game averaged 20.9 million viewers, the post got picked up by content farm outlets, and now this claim is accepted as fact by Google. This all feels very bleak. pic.twitter.com/NaEs9VF2LX
— Sports TV News & Updates (@TVSportsUpdates) June 17, 2025
We are all grappling with the growing influence of artificial intelligence on our world. But silly mistakes like this are not going to increase anyone’s confidence in its ability to actually provide worthwhile assistance to humans.
It also represents the perfect storm for the apocalyptic state of media in 2025. With X now flooded with trolls, parodies, and misinformation it takes real effort to discern what’s real and what’s not. A troll account with a blue checkmark posts something obviously fake, but because it looks kind of real, it gets picked up by content farms without being vetted. That’s enough legitimacy to then make its way to the world’s most powerful search engine, who is trying to use AI to become the only news source you need.
If that sounds incredibly depressing and dystopian… it’s because it is.