Rapper Kendrick Lamar has alleged that Drake is sexually attracted to children in diss tracks released in early May 2024. An Aug. 10, 2022 Drake tweet that could have been viewed as some sort of evidence for Lamar's allegations was fake.
On May 5, 2024, posts on social media sites like X (formerly Twitter) claimed to show an August 2022 post by the Canadian rapper Drake that read "Predator weak as hell in this movie lol put me in there I'll show em a real predator."
(X user @LyricVault)
The screenshot indicated that Drake's alleged August 2022 post had been deleted, which would make it difficult to verify with no other evidence. But in fact, the post never existed in the first place.
Fortunately, we didn't have to do much to check it — the post originated from @LyricVault, a satirical music account that does not post truthful content. That account includes a disclaimer in its bio: "Dedicated to satire — nothing posted here represents actual facts or news. Purely for laughs."
Therefore, we conclude that the Drake tweet was not real (we also double checked it against an archived version of Drake's Twitter page not long after the tweet was supposedly posted. It wasn't there).
While the deleted post might initially appear like a nonsensical comment, there was a good reason the joke picked up traction in May 2024.
In April 2024, two of rap's biggest names, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, began publicly feuding on their tracks. After a perceived diss in Lamar's verse on the song "Like That," released by Future and Metro Boomin, Drake released a diss track targeted at Kendrick titled "Push Ups" on April 19.
Kendrick fired back on April 30 with a track titled "euphoria," and the beef escalated from there. As of the writing of this story, the two superstars have released eight diss tracks targeting each other. On a particularly brutal diss track titled "meet the grahams," (Drake's real name is Aubrey Graham), Lamar alleged that Drake harbors sex offenders in his record label OVO and that he has a preference for younger, sometimes underage, women.
For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.