There was a time when the president would post something shockingly un-presidential—or worse—on social media and our collective response would be “I can’t believe he would say that.” That was a long time ago. These days we know there’s nothing he won’t say. But. But. Instead, we’re faced with a new problem: people are making fake Trump posts, and because the president has no boundaries, enough people think they’re real that they spread across the Internet like wildfire. So grows the slopheap of misinformation and confusion that’s mucking up our public discourse. Esquire’s Dave Holmes took stock of the situation this week—and shared a few tips for stopping the spread. Check it out below.
—Kevin Dupzyk, features director
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With this three-part checklist, you can spot a Trumpfake—and avoid helping push our democracy over a cliff.
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It has achieved epidemic status, it is damaging an information ecosystem whose health bar is already red and flashing, and it is working my last goddamn nerve. In recent weeks, inexplicably much more than ever, social media feeds have been awash in screenshots of demented Donald Trump social media screeds that are not real, and users are sharing them freely without taking a moment to verify them. In many cases, these posts are obviously not real, and in every case, they’re just about at the same level of dementedness as the actual screeds he’s posting at an ever more furious pace, so who even knows why it’s happening.
The good news is that it is very easy to spot a fake Donald Trump social media post, and taking that one extra second to eyeball the one in your feed before you disseminate it further is one tiny thing you can do to help save our democracy from speeding off a cliff. But it’s really not that hard to be part of the solution. Just remember these easy steps!
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Jack Thorne has been thinking a lot lately about the evil that men do. It tends to start with boys, and it’s nourished by misunderstanding. The screenwriter’s new adaptation of Lord of the Flies has much to say about both.
Thorne penned last year’s groundbreaking and devastating series Adolescence, which shocked viewers with its exploration of a 13-year-old boy accused of unspeakable violence. What leads someone so young and seemingly innocent so far astray? It’s an enduringly vital question, one that also haunted the late Lord of the Flies author William Golding, whose 1954 novel focused on a group of boys marooned on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. With no surviving adults, and no rescue in sight, the boys form a crude society that all too soon succumbs to cruelty and bloodshed.
Thorne’s four-part series just debuted on Netflix, and it’s a testament to the power of Golding’s narrative that the story still has the power to rouse controversy 70 years after its debut.
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Vincent took me to a sex shop to pick out underwear and helped me choose a stripper name. I went with Giovanni. He took me to my first audition. The interview was brief: Are you available three to four nights a week? Can you stay until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.? I said yes to both. Just like that, I had a job.
One quiet weeknight, I saw these two pretty girls and started talking to them. I got their Instagram and we took a photo, me in my Speedo in the middle. I didn’t think about it too much. A while later, I was coaching at a wrestling tournament, and I got a text message from another teacher. It was the picture those girls had taken with me. Apparently it was shared on Instagram first, but I guess it had been uploaded to Snapchat as well, like a bajillion times. There were all these comments from students: Mr. ___ is stripping!
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