49ers fans, media duped by NY Giants troll account’s fake report

In the social media haste to figure out exactly what went wrong, one erroneous report from a well-known troll account duped several 49ers fans and media members. Just two minutes after the trade deadline passed, a New York Giants-focused account under the name Wesley Steinberg posted a juicy rumor that could explain why a trade for a corner didn’t happen.

“The Giants had a trade agreed with the 49ers for Adoree’ Jackson but failed to report it to the league in time,” Steinberg posted.

The post quickly went viral, with several prominent Bay Area media members sharing it on their timelines, including San Francisco Chronicle 49ers beat reporter Eric Branch, KRON4’s Kate Rooney and Bonta Hill of 95.7 The Game and NBC Sports Bay Area. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)

95.7 The Game even built the “report” from Steinberg — who has more than 10,000 followers on X, a verified account with a blue checkmark and a bio that states that he’s an “NFL and NY Giants insider” and an “AS-MR Sports Representative” — into a video from host Dan Dibley.

But not only does AS-MR Sports not exist, Steinberg is not an actual person. He’s well-known in the New York Giants fan community as a social media troll. Multiple posts from Giants websites in 2022 pleaded with fans to ignore Steinberg.

“Wes Steinberg is a spoof account, he tries to bait people into believing him,” wrote a poster on the “Big Blue Interactive” forum about the Giants. “And as long as people peruse Twitter and #Giants is something they follow, he’s going to show up unless you mute or block him.”

A reverse image search on Google shows that “Steinberg” actually uses the photo of Michael Wolf, a founder and managing partner at the Los Angeles law firm Wolf, Rifkin, Shapiro, Schulman & Rabkin, LLP.

It didn’t take long for folks to realize that the report was fake, particularly after no reputable outlets corroborated Steinberg. Branch posted an acknowledgement, saying, “What I recently tweeted/untweeted was from a fake account. If you know, you know.”

Left unsaid was that, apparently, Branch himself did not know until it was too late.