Disinformation, you say? In 2025? No way.
There's a fun little meme making the rounds in the last few days from various social media feeds to Reddit and so on making fun of Cincinnati Bengals fans (an easy thing to do) in the wake of their failure to make the postseason (an easy thing for them to do). And while it seems like an extreme play within the realm of "realistic", the truth is that it just didn't happen.
That's too bad.
We could leave sleeping dogs lying here, but we hate fake news far more than any rivals around here, so it feels important to point out when something is blatantly false. And if you haven't seen it, this post is definitely that.
TRENDING: A group of Bengals fans had launched a petition to attempt to secure the team’s spot in the playoffs, accusing the Chiefs of purposely “throwing the game against the Broncos.”
— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) January 7, 2025
The petition garnered over 23,000 signatures…
Cincinnati did not make the playoffs. pic.twitter.com/hpxqdbMILg
Yeah that's a "snapshot" of a popular site for organizing petitions for various movements called Change.org and the proposed petition here is to encourage the NFL to allow the Bengals into the postseason.
The faux petition in question claims the Chiefs undermined the game of football's integrity and the creator, a "Karen Johnston", leans on that as the primary argument for the NFL's hopeful action to allow the Bengals to play in January anyway.
Given the desperate emotional state of Bengals fans on social media, plenty of folks have taken this as gospel truth and believed such a petition was created. Unfortunately such a page does not exist on Change.org and the biggest tell is that a "Karen" was responsible for this in the first place. There's also a reason why the only thing shared is a screenshot and not a link.
That said, the Bengals-related content at Change.org is interesting. There are four-year-old petitions to fire Zac Taylor and his staff and one from 2017 asking to change the team name from Bengals to Boners. (Yep).
As for the fake petition, we can troll Bengals fans for a lot of things since they're going to be whining and moaning about the same pathetic things for the next six months. But this isn't one of them and they deserve to be cleared of at least that much.