by claywassil
Have you ever wondered why you occasionally see Instagram memes that say “false information” and thought “who was going to believe this anyway?” Or have you wondered how easy it is to create a conspiracy? Well I may have done exactly that, but the thing is that it’s literally just a giant meme. I am in shock that this even happened.
It all started when I came across a shitpost of a meme. Like I want to clarify flat out that this was a meme and the creator of it clearly intended for it to be a meme, considering it was made to look like an NBC headline that read something along the lines of “Leaked emails show that facebook execs are using psyop tactics to make boomers fall for femboys”.
Clearly anybody in my general age group who is capable of reading this sentence should already know this was fake and not even meant to be interpreted as a conspiracy. It gets even better when you see the pictures that accompany this headline; Without going into detail there was barely-SFW drawing of a femboy alongside a picture of the meta-master, Zuckerberg himself with laser eyes saying “cool femboy facts”, and a stock image of a distressed boomer.
Like this was just a straight up meme… I decided to send this meme to my mom.
Needless to say my mom spends a lot of time on Facebook, and after a few minutes without her responding I asked “what do you think about the news?”. To both my delight and dismay, she responds “is this real? I can’t even tell at this point”. This was already further than I planned for this to go.
I naturally decided to see how long I could keep this going so I decided to add another meme to the mix and said “lmao yea, someone added in the laser eyes as a joke but everything else is real.” Then topped it off with “you heard about how they’re opening femboy hooters, right?”
My mom just said “Omfg what no!! How would I hear of this?”. My stoned ass literally came up with this as I typed it; I said “Yeah so Facebook is literally buying and rebranding all of the original hooters that are left, and they’re going to slowly and incrementally swap out all of the waitresses with extremely feminine men, and gradually overtime they were ultimately planning on turning the patrons gay by basically priming them to be attracted to men without them even realizing it at first. They said it’d disrupt boomer marriages, since that’s hooters main demographic. They wanted to heighten familial tensions in older conservative households in order to make it easier to sew political discord but a whistleblower just kinda exposed them for it all. I honestly think its kinda hilarious.”
I sent the classic femboy hooters meme and added a tiny bit of gaslighting by saying “you haven’t heard about this?” And my mom just said “its like bizzaro world.”
I genuinely had no idea where to take it from there so I left it like that and like four hours later I realized “oh fuck my moms gonna post about this in some ideological cesspit of qanon Facebook Karens”. So I told my mom that I made all of it up and she didn’t even believe me. She believed all of that and refused to believe that it was made up. She did not make any attempt to fact check this yet still refused to believe that this was a joke. After a few minutes she finally said she was already telling people about it, and that my stepdad, while he was working at his job as a truck driver literally blocked my mom because she sounded like a lunatic as she was describing this to him.
She told him that she had proof because I had sent pictures (side note; I always feel compelled to inform people that my stepdad is a convicted bank robber…also my mom is a second grade teacher). In this moment I finally realized why instagrams false info detector is so sensitive.
She didn’t tell me anything about posting to Facebook and i didn’t really feel like I wanted the answer, but I seriously hope some facebook-goer out there somewhere has tried to inform their meme-loving child that Facebook is opening femboy hooters as a direct result of my actions. It’s my favorite conspiracy because most conspiracies spread some sort of good guy/bad guy narrative, and if there were ever real-life bad guys, Facebook and hooters should be at the top of that list.