The Kevin Durant Twitter conspiracy theory, explained

Kevin Durant doesn’t shy down from engaging his critics on Twitter, which made a series of now-deleted tweets even more interesting. On Sunday night a user noticed something interesting.

Fans critiquing Durant is nothing new, nor is getting a response from the Warriors’ star — however, he’s normally direct. These two tweets spoke in the third person, referred to Durant as “him,” and confused people.

Maybe, but probably not. It just doesn’t fit Durant’s tweeting M.O. Granted, he would probably change up how he speaks if he were running fake accounts, but he has never shied away from being himself and engaging critics.

Why would Durant randomly decide to respond to one critic, who wasn’t even harsh, with a fake account? He’s dragged people harder for way less. Furthermore, there isn’t a pattern of accounts that defend Durant from critics on other tweets — just this one, so it seems like an honest mistake.

It’s likely Durant has a person to handle his branded tweets, whether it’s a personal assistant or someone who works for his agent. They will often send tweets from his account to promote appearances, sponsored content, and merchandise, like this one.

There are absolutely other people who have access to tweeting from Durant’s Twitter account. This is standard for any celebrity. If you’re managing multiple accounts from Tweetdeck, it’s easy to accidentally tweet from the wrong account if you select the wrong account, or fail to deselect the account you don’t want to tweet from.

They could, but it’s hard to intuit much without knowing who has access to tweeting as Durant. It’s possible that these opinions were solely those of the social media manager making the tweets, but if it was a personal assistant, then they could give us insight into Durant’s thinking.

It’s always best not to read into things too much, so we can probably chalk this one up to a humorous SNAFU, rather than buy into the idea that a multi-million-dollar athlete willingly wastes his time creating and maintaining fake accounts to engage his critics.

He just totally blew them off like it was nothing. There’s been no mention of what happened since last night, and if Durant didn’t tweet out the response, then it’s possible he doesn’t even know yet.

In short: Watch his account today, because things could get fun.

UPDATE: It appears Durant DID have an Instagram he used to argue with people, which he has now deleted.

On Tuesday Durant apologized for the tweets criticizing the Thunder.