As the NHL season approaches, fans are advised to be cautious about misleading news circulating on social media. Recently, a post claiming that Sidney Crosby requested a moment of silence for Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk went viral. The post, shared by a Facebook page called Northern Netminders, garnered 20,000 reactions and over 1,000 comments. It was also reshared on X, formerly known as Twitter, where it received 36,000 likes.

The now-deleted post alleged that Crosby made this statement on September 10, the same day Kirk was killed at a university event in Utah. However, an interview with Crosby on the Pittsburgh Penguins' official website that day made no mention of such a request or the incident involving Kirk.

Other players were also falsely implicated in similar claims. The page Northern Ice Kings made the same assertion about Connor McDavid, while Leafs Legacy claimed that Auston Matthews and William Nylander had called for a moment of silence. Additionally, a page named Oilers Nations stated that Brady Tkachuk of the Ottawa Senators had made the same appeal. A search on Facebook revealed that similar misleading posts were made about various athletes in other sports, including basketball and baseball.

An investigation uncovered 18 Facebook pages, primarily operated from outside Canada, that were posting clickbait content about hockey. These pages, which focused on Canadian players and teams, had follower counts ranging from 5,700 to 21,000 and were created between March 2024 and April 2025. Notably, none of the pages had Canadian managers, but many had administrators based in Vietnam, with others in the United States, Pakistan, and the Philippines.

The content from these pages often mirrored each other, suggesting a coordinated effort to drive traffic to ad-laden websites, likely using artificial intelligence to generate stories. Nine of the 18 pages linked to websites with domains registered in Vietnam, while others concealed their registration details. Some posts even featured AI-generated images, such as one claiming Crosby announced he and his partner were expecting a child, which was not substantiated by any official announcement.

Concerns have been raised about the rise of celebrity clickbait pages, particularly in light of Meta's relaxed moderation policies. In January, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it would end its partnership with fact-checking organizations in the U.S. in favor of a community notes model similar to that used on X. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the flagged pages were removed for violating company policies.

Fans attempting to verify these claims faced challenges, as Google's AI Overview tool sometimes used these misleading posts as sources for search summaries. For instance, a search regarding the Crosby baby post inaccurately stated that the couple was expecting a boy in December. Other searches about player statements also yielded misleading results. However, a search about McDavid declining a Tesla sponsorship was correctly identified as false due to a lack of credible sources.

AI Overviews aim to present information backed by high-quality websites, but they can struggle when relevant, credible information is scarce, leading to a "data void" that allows lower-quality content to surface. A Google spokesperson noted that these overviews are dynamic and change based on the information available, and the misleading results previously shared with the company are no longer appearing.