RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Filipino basketball player Rene Baterbonia at a training camp in June captivated social media users in the Philippines, including a TikTok post falsely claiming that an NBA coach had planned to recruit the 18-year-old for the 2026-27 season. AFP found that the clip had been digitally altered, while the original video was published before Baterbonia's death.
"OKC Thunder coach planned to recruit Rene Baterbonia after seeing his potential during his basketball games," the overlaid Tagalog-language text on a TikTok clip
reads.
The post has racked up over 869,000 views since it was published on July 20. It claims Baterbonia "would've been the first pure Filipino to join the NBA".
The TikTok video shows Mark Daigneault
, head coach of the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder (OKC Thunder), speaking at a press conference ( archived link
).
Daigneault can be heard saying they planned to draft Baterbonia
, an 18-year-old college student
at Ateneo De Manila University, before he died (archived here
and here
).
"Over the past year, our scouts closely followed Rene Baterbonia and were impressed by his talent, work ethic, and potential," he appears to say in the clip.
"Internally, we were preparing to select him in the 2026 to 2027 NBA draft and had even discussed a multi-year contract worth approximately 25 million US dollars."
"Unfortunately, events took an unexpected turn, and those plans will never become real."
Screenshot of altered footage on TikTok taken on August 5, 2026
Social media users shared the same clip on TikTok
and Facebook
, after Baterbonia and teammate Divine Adili drowned
during a team-building exercise in the eastern Philippines on June 8 ( archived link
).
Their deaths and the subsequent investigation by authorities unleashed a frenzy of social media posts about Baterbonia, a promising small-town athlete recently recruited into collegiate basketball.
Officials from his hometown of Talacogon in Mindanao island released a statement
on July 30, asking the public to stop soliciting financial assistance for the Baterbonia family and to stop posting visits to the basketball player's grave for content ( archived link
).
But this video has been altered and the original YouTube video was published on May 31, eight days before Baterbonia's death.
A reverse image search
using the clip's keyframes found the original unedited version
of the video published on the OKC Thunder's official YouTube channel ( archived link
).
The video's description reads: "Head Coach Mark Daigneault speaks with the media at end-of-season interviews."
Screenshot comparison of the altered footage on TikTok (left) and the original YouTube video
Daigneault made no mention of Baterbonia in the entirety of the video.
A close inspection of the altered footage found that Daigneault's mouth did not match the audio.
Using the Hiya detection tool within the Verification Plugin
found the clip's audio was "very likely AI-generated".
Screenshot of the audio's analysis on Hiya
AFP has previously debunked misinformation
about Rene Baterbonia.
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