chapotraphouse

Thanks for pointing this out. Some thoughts:

I don't trust someone to be so remorseless and inflammatory in way that self-sabotages

But such remorselessness and being inflammatory is becoming increasingly normalized because it often does not result in self-sabotage. This is a fairly extreme case (as far as how Monty Burns-esque it is), but there are plenty of other examples that are nearly as bad, maybe worse, where many people end up rallying behind the side of evil to defend the poor smol bean ultraprivileged. Especially since the initial theft really did happen, the piece of shit really did steal the hat meant for the kid, I don't blame casually-scrolling hexbears (including me) for flatly believing the additional bit to be true, until you pointed out that it's most probably not.

That said, since you did check this out and it looks like it's fake, that doesn't surprise me either and I'm glad you caught it and brought it to everyone's attention. Thank you. I also agree that everyone would do well to double check this sort of thing for veracity as much as possible. Unfortunately most of us don't really have the time to do that with every single meme story that gets posted, it's just not feasible. It's reasonable to assume that if it's being posted here it's probably real, but that's only because this site has a good history of being trustworthy about these things, mostly because there are a fair number of people like you who do look into it for the rest of us, especially when posting it. It is mostly the onus of the person making the post to double check that what they're posting is legit, but I can also understand if Posadas thought he was getting this from another reputable source and just didn't take the time to look into it before posting. He really should have though.