Instagram Hoax Fools Department of Energy Head Rick Perry

A hoax meme is currently spreading across Instagram — and Rick Perry, the head of the United States Department of Energy, just fell for it.

The image is nothing more than a huge paragraph of text warning users that Instagram is changing its privacy policy "tomorrow," and if they don't repost it, Instagram will have "permission" to use everything they've shared on the platform.

"Feel free to repost!! #nothanksinstagram," Perry wrote alongside the image, which has since been deleted from his Instagram page but still up on his Twitter account at the time of writing.

If we saw the post on our not-so-internet-savvy parents' Instagram feed, we'd probably roll our eyes and scroll on — but the idea that the person responsible for the United States' nuclear arsenal fell for the hoax is downright terrifying.

The post is clearly fake for countless reasons, some of which are obvious — part of the word "now" is missing, for example, and some words are only partially bolded.

Others are a bit less conspicuous, such as the reference to the Rome Statute.

The average person might not know that that's an agreement that established the International Criminal Court, an entity — which, as The Next Web pointed out, the United States isn't even a member of — tasked with investigating such atrocities as genocide and crimes against humanity.

Think they would care about a social network "stealing" photos of your newborn nephew or your barista's stellar latte art?

Oh, and that's the other thing: Instagram doesn't need to "steal" those photos.

Take a look at the platform's Terms of Use, and you'll find that, when you post anything on the site, you "grant to [Instagram] a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings)."

So, to recap, Perry not only couldn't tell that something was off about the hoax just by looking at it, he also apparently doesn't know what the Rome Statute is or how social media works in general.

Again, this man is in charge of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal — and a person with so much power really shouldn't be this easily fooled.

READ MORE: Former Texas Governor Rick Perry fell for an old-school Instagram hoax [The Next Web]

More on Instagram: Instagram Wants to Fact-Check Your Memes