DJ Vlad says his recent sharing of a number of false claims involving Roc Nation, Megan Thee Stallion, and Tory Lanez was done with the intention of highlighting “how people will believe any outrageous lie” as long as it supports their own conspiratorial thinking.
In an X update shared Thursday (Feb. 19), Vlad noted the high volume of impressions his original post has accumulated in recent days, adding that it would appear that “millions of people” mistook the “obvious satire” for fact.
“I tried to make this post as ridiculous as possible, but after 14 million impressions, it seems like millions of people still think that I was serious. I was not,” Vlad said Thursday. “Everything in this post was made up. I was never paid by Roc Nation, nor was Jay-Z involved in any of these outlandish things. My point for posting this was to show how people will believe any outrageous lie that someone says to prove their own conspiracy theory. I proved my point.”
Vlad continued: “I know that a lot of people will take this post and create a new narrative that Jay-Z forced me to do this. He did not. Nobody from Roc Nation reached out to me because they saw it was obvious satire. Tory's legal team reached out to me to see if there were any actual facts in my post, and I told them it was all sarcasm. They did tell me they filed some legal documents with the State Supreme and Superior Courts and are waiting for a reply. Although I've always believed that Tory shot Megan, I also feel that at this point, Tory has paid his debt to society, and I hope he gets an early release.”
Unfortunately, as we’ve been forced to point out time and time again, far too many people tend to take anything they see on social media at face value without even so much as an attempt at fact-checking.
In our current era, this is not only stupid, but also downright reckless. Thanks to the proliferation of AI-generated gobbledygook, not to mention parody accounts, it seems that a swath of people fall for bullshit of one variety or another on a daily basis.
In his original post on Feb. 14, Vlad made a number of false claims in jest, writing, among other things, “Roc Nation has been paying me to support Megan” and “Jay also paid Trump NOT to pardon Tory.” As the YouTube personality himself has since made clear, these claims, and all of the ones included in his original post, are false.
Misinformation proved to be a damaging force across years’ of coverage over the 2020 shooting of Megan Thee Stallion, for which Tory Lanez was convicted in 2022. The following year, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
In a 2024 interview with Complex, Alex Spiro, an attorney for Megan, called out Tory and his team for “spinning up these nonsense bloggers from jail” following the conviction.
“Misinformation isn’t gonna be an issue in the court of law where he was convicted and remains convicted and incarcerated,” Spiro said at the time.
