Kevin Durant Still Uses a Burner Account to Respond to Haters Online

The next time someone claps back at your Kevin Durant slander online, it may be KD himself. 

Durant was infamously outed as using Twitter burner accounts to defend his honor in 2017 when he sent a couple of tweets from his verified Twitter account in which he referred to himself in the third person. Subsequent sleuthing revealed that he was doing the same thing on Instagram.

Ever since his anonymous accounts had their cover blown, Durant hasn’t stopped replying to haters online—he’s just been doing it from his official accounts. 

But Durant hasn’t abandoned the burners entirely. He revealed on the latest episode of Showtime’s All the Smoke with former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson that he still feels compelled to respond to haters from behind a mask from time to time. 

“I’m still going to do the burner thing,” Durant said. “There’s some s--- where you’ve just got to be like, these folks are always going to figure out a way. Certain people, I’m going to come back on my regular account. But if I’m just trying to do my thing, dip in—I got the burners. I just slipped up that one time, and you know why I slipped up.”

Durant had told GQ shortly after the initial tweets that he had forgotten to log out of his main account because he was groggy after a nap. Barnes’s hearty laugh after Durant says, “You know why I slipped up,” makes you wonder whether the explanation he gave GQ was the real one.

Jackson’s presence during this conversation is interesting, given that he was quite critical of Durant’s social media behavior during the initial 2017 controversy. 

“I look at you now as I look at everyone else on Twitter and Instagram that has a little egg avatar,” Jackson said. “You are that person now. You cannot be excluded from that. Who creates a fake page? I’m the person, if I want to respond to somebody on social media, it has to come from my page with a verified check on it. He’s an egg avatar now, I have no respect for him.”

They’ve presumably smoothed things over by now.