Durant plays defense
Warriors forward Kevin Durant, on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, apologizes for a Twitter exchange that criticized his former team and coach.
Days before Kevin Durant was scheduled to speak about building a brand at a technology conference, the Golden State Warriors’ superstar took a technological blowtorch to the most valuable asset in his portfolio — his own name.
Durant’s meltdown came after he tried to respond to haters on the Internet, getting caught in an apparent attempt at deception as he threw his former Oklahoma City Thunder coach, Billy Donovan, and teammates under the bus in oddly worded and hastily deleted tweets Sunday.
“I went a little too far,” Durant told a largely supportive crowd Tuesday at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt SF technology conference at Pier 48, which is walking distance from where the Warriors’ Mission Bay arena is being built.
“I don’t regret clapping back at anybody or talking to my fans on Twitter,” Durant said. “I do regret using my former coach’s name, and my former organization that I played for. That was childish, that was idiotic — all those type of words. I regret doing that, and I apologized to him for doing that.”
Durant and his agent and business partner, Rich Kleiman, had been scheduled for a 20-minute “fireside chat” to talk, according to the conference agenda, “about what it means to be in control of
your own brand — from investment, to management, to media.”
Durant lost control of all that Sunday when eagle-eyed Twitter users saw two strange tweets from Durant’s official Twitter account. They came in response to another tweet asking for “one legitimate reason for leaving (Oklahoma City) other than getting a championship.”
Golden State fans were happy Durant left the Thunder to join the Warriors last summer, especially after he helped lead the Warriors to a second NBA championship in three years. But Durant has been criticized by Thunder fans for abandoning teammates including league MVP Russell Westbrook to take what they saw as a shortcut to a championship.
Durant’s account — @KDTrey5 — responded twice, both in a third-person voice. The first read: “He didn’t like the organization or playing for Billy Donovan. His roster wasn’t that good, it was just him and russ.”
The second tweet read: “Imagine taking russ off that team, see how bad they were. Kd can’t win a championship with those cats.”
Then the tweets disappeared, prompting the Internet hive to suspect that Durant had accidentally posted the tweets from his official account and had meant to send them from a fake one he set up to defend himself. That suspicion went into overdrive when the tweets disappeared. Durant told a fan who asked him if he thought he was being slick, “No, I just deleted it.”
Twitter’s mobile app makes it easy to add multiple accounts and switch between them with just a couple of taps. The leading theory — which Durant did not confirm Tuesday — is that Durant forgot to make the switch before hitting “send.”
Reddit members added to the feeding frenzy by uncovering a private Instagram account Durant might also have used, @quiresultan, named after streets in the neighborhood where he grew up.
So as soon as Durant stepped on stage and sat down, Jordan Crook, the TechCrunch panel moderator, asked him to explain what happened. Durant stopped short of detailing exactly how he arrived at his social media meltdown, but owned up to the fact that he’d committed a costly technology foul.
He said he did run a private Instagram account for friends and family, but used Twitter to “engage with fans.”
“I think it’s a great way to engage with basketball fans,” Durant said. “But I happened to take it a little too far and that’s what happens sometimes when I get into these basketball debates.”
Durant said he wasn’t going to stop tweeting because fans “really enjoy it, and I think it’s a good way to connect us all. But I will scale back a little bit right now, just focus on playing basketball.”
He also said he wanted to move on from the ordeal. “It was tough to deal with yesterday. I was really upset with myself,” he said.
Durant was apparently practicing what is known on the Internet as “sockpuppetry,” which means one person — a puppetmaster — uses more than one online account to pretend to be different people, said Stanford computer science researcher Srijan Kumar.
Sockpuppetry is “deception at its finest,” he said. “It creates a false illusion of consensus by using multiple accounts to support and defend one another. In reality, the opinions are only of one person pretending to be several.”
The practice has taken some dark turns: Former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros claimed in a lawsuit that sockpuppets had been used to intimidate her. (The network disclaimed any knowledge of the accounts.) And amid widespread concern over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, congressional investigators and the Department of Justice are looking into the role played by fake social media accounts and pages.
Compared to such incidents, a basketball player hiding behind a mask online seems mostly harmless. The Disrupt audience gave Durant a warm round of applause. Some fans on Twitter were not as willing to forgive.
“I don’t think I’ve ever switched from liking an athlete so much to hating them with burning passion like I have with @KDTrey5,” said Twitter user Amarildo Alijaj.
After turning the discussion to tech and investing, Crook tried to put Durant on the spot one more time by asking him a series of speed-round questions.
One of the queries: “Twitter or Instagram?”
“Uhhh, Twitter,” Durant said. San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Katie Dowd contributed to this story.