Did the NFL admit to canceling Elon's DOGE Super Bowl ads as several viral social media posts say? No, that's not true: This claim originated on a satirical Facebook page with a clear disclaimer. The page owner is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on February 12, 2025, on a Facebook page named "America's Last Line Of Defense." It featured the following text:
The NFL admits to canceling Elon's DOGE Super Bowl ads.
Time to cancel the NFL.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Feb 13 09:27:32 2025 UTC)
Lead Stories previously debunked the story that there were ever "Elon DOGE Super Bowl ads" to begin with. The NFL's website with News & Releases for the media did not mention Elon Musk or DOGE ads (archived here) at the time of writing.
Lead Stories searched for stories with the phrases "NFL", "DOGE" and "Ads" using Google News (archived here) and no news articles about any such ads being cancelled were returned.
The Facebook page (archived here) where the claim originated had a description that read:
The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery and propaganda for cash.
Nothing on this page is real.
According to the page transparency tab of the page it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites debunked by Lead Stories over the years.
