Rick Perry's embarrassing case for tech literacy in government

The most powerful people in the world are dangerously bad at the internet

Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Karl Stolleis/Getty Images, Stefan Zaklin/Getty Images)

Former Texas Gov. and current Energy Secretary Rick Perry has deleted his embarrassing Instagram post from Tuesday night, but, as of this writing, the tweet it automatically generated for his @governorperry account still stands. "Feel free to repost!!" it cheerfully offers, adding "#nothanksinstagram" and what is now a link to nowhere.

That link once led to Perry's share of a classic social media hoax. (A number of celebrities fell for it too, and Perry has since put up a parody post poking fun at his own mistake.) You've likely seen this before: a breathless announcement that the website is changing its terms of service to reduce user privacy or allow unwanted use of user content, followed by a promise that if you just share this image, your account will be protected. There's often a faint legal gloss to the language — a reference to some law, possibly nonexistent or, as here, irrelevant to the matter at hand — which is error-laden to the point of incoherence. And though Perry did not go this route, it's usually captioned to the effect of, "I don't know if this is real, but better safe than sorry!"

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.