Is it a great story?

Last GM:

The Source

Our source, whose identity is still unknown, contacted me via anonymous “egg” accounts on both Instagram and Twitter, claiming that they had a scoop. The source explained that they worked in artificial intelligence and, after noticing a “bunch of weird tweets” directed at Sixers writers, used an open-source data analysis tool to link five accounts through commonalities including similarities in who the accounts followed and linguistic quirks.

“They all have a pattern of likes, follows, and tweets which are EXTRAORDINARILY similar,” the source wrote in a direct message on Twitter. For example, the source explained, all five follow accounts tied to Sixers players, members of the Philly front office, and beat reporters who cover the team; Toronto Raptors writers; Canadian high school basketball; and University of Chicago basketball. They discuss the same topics, use strikingly similar phrasing, and, at times, have tweeted out identical media images. Some of those shared attributes were odd, such as a distaste for beards and “unknown sources.” According to the source’s findings, the three newest accounts followed 75 accounts in common—roughly half of their total respective follows—with another 52 accounts followed by two of the three. (The Ringer was unable to verify those numbers, but they seem to track with our analysis.)

https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/5/29/17406750/bryan-colan...

And Hinkie? Is he sad? Angry? Vindicated? No, he says, he is happy. Happy for Embiid. Happy for all the people in the Sixers’ organization.

He’s not terribly interested in talking about it, though. Hinkie has long espoused having “the longest view in the room,” and he’s currently focused on the future. Machine learning. Artificial intelligence. The cross-pollination of different industries. On a noncompete until the end of the season, he’s viewing this “gap year” (his phrase) as an opportunity to reassess, reinvest in himself and shed his old persona.

https://www.si.com/nba/2016/11/30/sam-hinkie-after-the-proce...

------

Not sure that makes him the source, hard to see how benefits in any way that's not petty and low payoff.

Seems like if he's the source, he's tipping off his hand in a manner that's extremely low payout from what's possible.

-----------

Lets say you're Daryl Morey, and you have to make decisions on whether to clear out cap room to try and make a run at signing LeBron James,

how useful would it be to know which sock puppet twitter accounts are James'?

which are people in his inner circle (I hear he's touchy about the term 'posse')?

which are all the accounts for all the other GMs who might be interested in signing James?

-------

this information is potentially wildly useful

it's even more useful if other people don't know you have this capacity.

-------------
-------------

Let's say you don't have an NBA owners ear,

Let's say you just want to accurately price stocks,

What are you placing the odds at the some number of publically traded CEO have a few sock puppet social media accounts that they use to manage their public reputations?

How profitable would it be to be able to ID those sock puppet accounts?