An entitled female fan at a Sept. 5 Miami Marlins-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game insisted a father hand over a home run baseball he’d recovered in the stands and handed to his son. The fan—dubbed “Phillies Karen” online—had also pursued the valuable souvenir and come up short.
Soon after, a school district in Hammonton, N.J., became the subject of a storm of misinformation.
What does a baseball game in Florida have to do with a school system in New Jersey? Ultimately, not much. But online sleuths who viewed viral videos of the incident, bent on pursuing justice, became convinced they’d identified the woman as a Hammonton schools administrator.
“Phillies Karen” has no connection to Hammonton schools, but in an experience that’s increasingly common for school districts, Hammonton leaders saw a lie spread much faster than the truth ever could. So district leaders took a creative approach, defusing the situation with some strategically placed humor.
District leaders and communications officials say old public relations strategies are no match for social media, smartphones, and newly accessible artificial intelligence platforms, which have contributed to a swell of misinformation about everything from local bond issues to claims of litter boxes in school bathrooms.
The day after the baseball incident, Hammonton administrators woke up to dozens of calls, social media posts, and emails demanding the supposed employee’s firing. Two people even went through the more complicated process of filing formal harassment complaints on the district’s website.
“I’m a Yankees fan, so I don’t follow Phillies games,” said Superintendent Thomas Ramsay, who hadn’t seen the viral videos when school board President John Lyons called to alert him that a zealous internet mob wanted him to fire an employee who didn’t exist.
The district has 3,400 students, four schools, and no communications director. Ramsay and Lyons, who recognize every district administrator, said they knew the woman in the video was not an employee. They also quickly realized they needed to issue a statement, but they were concerned their correction wouldn’t get as much attention as the original falsehood.
To cut through the noise, Lyons decided the message should include some sarcasm so it would be more likely to be shared on social media and published by media outlets.
“The woman identified on social media as ‘Phillies Karen’ is not, and has never been an employee of the Hammonton Public Schools located in Hammonton, New Jersey,” the statement said. “Anyone who works for our school district, attended as a student, or lives in our community would obviously have caught the ball bare-handed in the first place, avoiding this entire situation!”
To confront misinformation, district gets creative
The approach was successful. Within two days, a district Facebook post of the statement had 14,000 reactions, it had been shared 2,000 times, and shares on other platforms had gained similar traction. Large media outlets—including Yahoo News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—published the joke. Phone calls to the central office demanding the woman’s firing were replaced with calls to congratulate the district for having a sense of humor about the situation.
Lyons gets credit for the joke, Ramsay said. While the statement was comedic, the notion that a lie could have harmed the district’s reputation was not, Lyons said. With experience in New Jersey political campaigns, he knows how to put a little mustard on a press release.
“New Jersey politics is a contact sport, and I’ve learned that you can’t take yourselves too seriously,” Lyons said. “If we’d put out something that’s just sterile and boilerplate, my concern was that it would not get picked up, that we would spend a bunch of time trying to beat back a story that wasn’t true. My remedy to that was to try to put a spin on it.”
In a January 2024 survey of about 400 school communications officials conducted by the National School Public Relations Association, 96% of respondents said the spread of misinformation was an issue, up from 81% in 2020, and 78% said their district had faced a challenge related to the spread of false information in the last 12 months.
“It’s really this steady drumbeat we’ve been hearing,” Barbara Hunter, the executive director of the NSPRA, told Education Week in June.
The organization has provided its members with strategies to help counter disinformation—knowingly false information intentionally spread—and misinformation, which may stem from an exaggeration or an honest misunderstanding of a policy or data.
District communications directors said they’ve learned when to shut off comments on schools’ social media pages, how to rebut lies on various platforms, and how to share as much information as possible without violating student or employee privacy.
They’ve also learned how to respond quickly to a snowballing crisis.
In Hammonton, that meant leaders couldn’t wait until normal business hours on Monday to address misinformation that emerged on a Saturday. So Lyons and Ramsay quickly huddled with the school board’s attorney, drafted the statement, and contacted an on-call employee to post it on the district’s website and social media.
“There’s a time to make a joke and make light of something, and there’s a time to be serious,” Lyons said. “If [people on the internet] don’t know anything about our schools, at least they know we have a good sense of humor.”
The woman in the viral video has yet to be successfully identified, but several other targets of online misinformation have had to issue strong denials after they were falsely accused of being “Phillies Karen.”
After the father at the Marlins-Phillies game, Drew Feltwell, quickly handed over the ball to deescalate the situation, Harrison Bader, the Phillies outfielder who hit the home run, invited the family to meet him after the game.
Feltwell has asked internet sleuths to call off the dogs.
“Please don’t do anything to that lady. … The internet already messed her up pretty good,” he told USA Today.
