76ers’ GM accused in Twitter scandal

The Ringer website reported Tuesday that Bryan Colangelo, the Philadelphia 76ers’ president of basketball operations and general manager, secretly operated five Twitter accounts, using them to criticize players and coaches, telegraph team decisions and disclose one player’s health issue.

Philadelphia center Joel Embiid, a main target of the “burner” accounts’ attacks, responded to the report by tweeting a photo of his younger self looking serious, with the single word “BRUH.”

Embiid then set about liking the tweets critical of him from the alleged fake accounts, and, referencing former 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie, tweeted to one of them: “Joel told me that @samhinkie IS BETTER AND SMARTER THAN YOU @AlVic40117560 #BurnerAccount.”

Colangelo, in a statement to the Ringer, admitted only that one of the five accounts was his, denying knowledge of the others.

“Like many of my colleagues in sports, I have used social media as a means to keep up with the news,” the statement said. “While I have never posted anything whatsoever on social media, I have used the @Phila1234567 Twitter account referenced in this story to monitor our industry and other current events.”

Ringer reporter Ben Detrick wrote that the website had received a tip about the five accounts last week from an anonymous Twitter user. That user claimed to work in artificial intelligence, and had used open-source data analysis to

examine various accounts that were tweeting critically about the Sixers to writers who covered the team. According to a direct message from that user, the analysis found that the accounts’ likes and follows, as well as the language in their tweets, were “EXTRAORDINARILY similar.”

Detrick contacted the 76ers and asked about two of the accounts, but not the other three.

“I did this to see whether the partial disclosure would trigger any changes to the other accounts,” he wrote. Within hours of that call, Detrick wrote, the other three accounts had been switched from public to private.

Colangelo, 52, has previously held the top basketball operations job with the Toronto Raptors and Phoenix Suns. He was NBA Executive of the Year in 2007 with Toronto.

The burner accounts were consistently critical of and even insulting to certain players, especially Embiid, Jahlil Okafor, Nerlens Noel and Markelle Fultz. They also tweeted negatively about Hinkie and Raptors President Masai Ujiri, and defended Colangelo, even when someone criticized his shirt collars on Twitter.

At one point, one of the accounts tweeted that Okafor had failed a physical, which was not public information.

The story blew up “NBA Twitter” in the hours after it posted, with several terms related to it trending on the social-media service.