It's actually surprisingly complex and a pretty bad job by everyone involved, from Redditlover to the userbase, to the mods, to (especially) Pro Football Talk. As someone who followed this way too closely, I'm gonna post the entire timeline here for future Reddit historians.
- On Wednesday night, Redditlover makes a discussion post in which he says he heard a rumour on the radio that Edelman is going to be suspended for PEDs.
- The userbase roasts him for suggesting Edelman is on steroids. Redditlover turns troll and starts going at the userbase. Mods delete the post that night.
- Edelman is suspended Thursday afternoon for steroids
- On the reaction thread to that news, a reply that says "Holy ****, that guy from last night was right" gets upvoted
- Pro Football Talk presumably sees that comment, chases the original thread, and writes a story about how Redditlover broke the story the night before. They can't see the body of the post where RL said he heard a rumour on the radio, because it's been deleted.
- Multiple other outlets pick up on the false story from the PFT post.
- Whoever runs the r/Patriots twitter retweets the PFT story, obstensibly co-signing the erroneous report that this sub broke the story.
- Redditlover makes another post taking credit for breaking the news that 12 hours earlier he said he heard on the radio. Userbase eats it up and appoints him as the Adam Schefter of r/patriots
- Redditlover makes another post asking the sub to guess the next bit of bad news. This post is improbably not removed by the mods. It accrues 250 replies and sits on the front page of the sub.
- PFT writes another post that Redditlover is about to break another story.
- RL makes a final post exposing himself as a troll. Mods delete it in 8 minutes.
TLDR: this guy went from posting a rumor he heard to getting national news stories written about him within 48 hours. Mods went from deleting him to co-signing him to deleting him again over the same time period.
