The pinned tweet on Juniper’s account is “it’s incredibly easy to create fake news it’s actually ridiculous lol.” But that hasn’t stopped right-wing media outlets from frothing at the mouth over her tweets, most recently a fake news headline indicating that Snickers was set to remove the beloved “dick vein” from its eponymous candy bars.
On April 16, @JUNlPER, whose display handle is Transgender Marx, tweeted a doctored version of a news story with the headline “Snickers are officially caving and removing the world-renowned dick vein from the candy bar.” As Juniper told co-hosts Brittany Spanos and Ej Dickson on Rolling Stone‘s podcast Don’t Let This Flop, the “Snickers dick vein” had been a meme for quite some time before her tweet, but she was inspired to post the fake headline after watching the right-wing media have a collective freakout over the candy company Mars (which also owns Snickers) changing the green M&M’s iconic footwear from thigh-high boots to sneakers. The move, according to a press release from the company, was to “better reflect a “more dynamic, progressive world” and to show off the character’s “personality, rather than their gender.”
“Tucker Carlson actually talked about it on Fox News, that it was ‘wokeifying’ M&Ms or whatever,” Juniper says, chuckling. She decided to post about Snickers removing the dick vein as “a satirical way to point out how just ridiculous [the media] are about some of these things — how they’ll take these stories and kind of run with it and not even verify anything.”
Even though Juniper’s followers knew that the post was intended as a joke, those outside her audience did not. After her tweet went viral — as well as a follow-up photo of an apparently veinless Snickers bar, which she says she pulled from an old Reddit post — many on Twitter believed it to be true, to the degree that Snickers itself had to post a tweet reassuring fans that the vein wasn’t going anywhere.
no fucking way pic.twitter.com/PNKkhaBd4f
— transgender marx (@JUNlPER) April 16, 2022
This was not Juniper’s first time inadvertently spawning a viral news cycle. A few months ago, she posted a tongue-in-cheek fake news headline referring to Julia Fox attributing her breakup with Kanye to her going into “goblin mode,” a quote that Fox never actually gave (and which she instantly took to Instagram to refute). Yet even though the quote was clearly fake, many news outlets took it seriously, publishing “what is goblin mode” explainers and blog posts in an effort to jump on the zeitgeist and capitalize on search traffic.
“Both of these moments were really similar in a way,” says Juniper. “In my opinion, I made a pretty clearly ironic post riffing on stuff and making a joke. But once it gets outside of your circle, it’s shocking just how quickly people will take that seriously and won’t make check to make sure it’s true. It really reinforces to me just how easily you can trick people…It’s really shown me how, if I had malicious intent, just how easy [it would be to] make a fake story about, say, trans people, and get it picked up by people with malicious intentions.”
Of course, by gleefully fomenting a fake news cycle (albeit in a tongue-in-cheek, trollish way), one could argue that Juniper does indeed have malicious intentions, even if it’s in service of a larger agenda of pointing out the hypocrisies of the right wing and the news media in general. It’s a criticism she takes to heart. “At the end of the day, deceiving a lot of people in this way can be harmful, I’ll be honest,” she says, citing a Fox Business news story about the Snickers dick vein hoax that included comments from “boomers” clutching their pearls about “woke mobs freaking out over candy bars.” “And in a way that is pretty bad. But my intention with the posts is to mock those right wingers and point out how stupid this [panic over] woke mobs is; how stupid these cancel culture freakouts are. But I guess when you do deep irony and sarcasm, it doesn’t translate when it gets that big.”
Even though the Snickers dick vein story is still getting picked up and treated as legitimate news, Juniper has continued to post about the Snickers dick vein. “Don’t eat a snickers that doesn’t have a dick vein!!!,” she recently posted next to a photo of a hospital bed with an IV.
don’t eat a snickers that doesn’t have a dick vein!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/2eY2WJbjEc
— transgender marx (@JUNlPER) April 26, 2022
On this week’s episode of Don’t Let This Flop, Spanos and Dickson also question if Drake is horny for Abby Shapiro, Timothée Chalamet Coachella smooching rumors (and one model’s very annoying response to said rumors), and himbos who make sculptures of endangered species out of Baby Bell packets.
DLTF is released Wednesdays on all audio streaming platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher and more.