Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Stephane Cardinale/Corbis, Chad Salvador/WWD)
There’s an old Norm Macdonald joke where he explains to the audience that in trying to be a better person, he’s stopped lying as often. “I used to lie all the time,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a reason for your lies, like you wanna protect somebody’s feelings, but you ever just lie for no reason?” Macdonald didn’t invent lying for no reason, but it certainly feels like the legacy of his joke lives on, on Twitter and Instagram and everywhere, where day after day, our feeds are inundated with fake news and fake screenshots and fake celebrity meltdowns. In the past week alone, we’ve endured embittered snark from Olivia Wilde, divorce rumors from Selena Gomez, and future Bond girl Addison Rae. (Though whatever Channing Tatum was doing on Instagram was real.)
Maybe these users aren’t so much lying for no reason — there are always ulterior motives behind fan communities getting each other worked up, and Rae as a Bond girl is just funny (and kind of perfect) — but the extent to which the Internet is full of fake screenshots with the right fonts, semi-thoughtful photoshopping, or a simple tag to Deadline or Variety, it’s increasingly easy to create or fall for fake celebrity news. It’s not even fancy AI. It’s kind of just … PooCrave knockoffs.
PooCrave rose in the wake of PopCrave, a Twitter account that is practically legacy media at this point, which aggregates news and celebrity birthdays and casting announcements (not to be confused with PopBase … which is similar and different). PooCrave sprung to life five years later, and with its PopCrave-esque logo tweets out PopCrave-esque announcements that are patently false. “Lena Dunham’s new memoir Famesick has officially outsold the Quran, Torah, and Bible!” announces the most recent post. There’s a not-so-solid case to be made that this is all satire. It’s not lying; it’s actually showing us a mirror through which we can see ourselves. PooCrave perhaps does not want us falling for the bit, so much as it does want us to be laughing with it. (PooCrave did not respond to a request for comment.) Maybe we want to believe that Lena Dunham can outsell the Bible. Olivia Wilde melting down over Harry Styles’s engagement goes viral not because it’s convincing but because that would be crazy, and we love stuff that’s crazy.
There is a tedium, however, to scrolling through a bunch of stuff that isn’t real, that maybe isn’t even pretending to be real, all for the sake of lying for no reason. Mostly these are a reminder that media literacy is at an all time low, and so is real-deal celeb-on-celeb mess. Combine these two scarcities and watch how PooCravian information proliferates with no end in sight. What’s most frustrating, perhaps, about trying to sift through a feed that’s full of disinformation (and ads, and AI, and everything else that feels busted about social media) is that it distracts from the extremely real and extremely weird stuff celebrities are actually doing. Channing Tatum’s aforementioned “crashout” on Instagram was not dramatic so much as it was baffling. Your ex-fiancé gets re-engaged and you’re posting … a video of people hitting each other with pool noodles in the park and saying you want to do that next time you’re in New York? What? That’s kind of crazy or at least bizarre enough to warrant attention. It’s a far funnier reaction than clapping back — the quiet, eager desperation to want to do something fun outside in the wake of news that might be negatively impacting your day. No one could make that up — they couldn’t even try.
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