Dear Rick Ross: Your Facebook Page Is Out of Control

Miami's Rick Ross is a rapper of varied, expensive interests. Rosé wine. Tilapia. Hustling. Doubler-decker yachts. Lavender shoes. Crab legs with heavy butter. Bad butt implant surgery. The sexual habits of conjoined twins. Sadomasochist porn featuring Disney princesses. Cases of booty-licking gone wrong.

In case you're wondering why that list took a right turn hard enough to flip a school bus, those last four links came from Ross' Facebook page, which he's farmed out to the clickbait company PressRoomVIP. That company spends the better part of every day blasting out ridiculous links from Ross' Facebook page. The posts are entirely cringe-worthy and certainly not Boss-level material.

Some of the links apparently get deleted after a set amount of time: Despite the fact that we've caught Ross posting articles for months, including one November link titled "Woman Dies Because Man's Penis Is Too Big" and "Daycare Busted Running Toddler Fight Club," many of the clips seem to vanish after a few weeks online.

Ross has also occasionally entered into the medical-advice industry, posting since-deleted links such as "Masturbating Too Much Can Kill You," "How to Get Pregnant Real Fast," and one still-extant clip about what the size of a woman's butt might or might not (we're guessing might not) say about her health. WebMD can suck it.

Whoever is posting the articles has also seriously upped the ante in the past handful of months: The links that remain online from 2015 (yes, we scrolled that far back — we are journalists) mostly link to videos of awesome rap verses and dope basketball plays.

But last Wednesday, Ross treated us to a gem titled "12 Shades of Childhood Ruined, #9 Make Sure You Close Your Eyes," which was just a click-through slideshow of various cartoon characters, including Donald Duck and the Teletubbies, caught in sexually suggestive situations. The list also included a GIF of Mister Rogers giving the middle finger and a clip of the Angry Beavers having sex with each other. The header photo, which was blasted out to the 8.8 million people who follow Ross on Facebook, inexplicably displayed Disney's Pocahontas and Princess Tiana getting flogged and/or spanked by their male counterparts.
There's also this from Thursday, presented without comment:
Ross isn't the only Miami hip-hop star to sell out his Facebook page for clickbait money: Miami stalwarts Trick Daddy and Trina have also contracted out their pages to similar companies, though Trick Daddy's only sponsorship offer came from a company that posts offensive memes about Asian people and women. (Given Trick's recent social media tirades, in which he spat at a woman he didn't like and told black women to "tighten up" before "Spanish" and white women somehow take their men, the content probably doesn't offend T Double D personally.)

Likewise, Miami legend Trina last week made sure her 9 million followers found out about this case of a man who supposedly ate drugs stashed in his twin brother's butt, died, and caused said brother to get charged with manslaughter. There's a hell of a lot of anus-related posts among the three rappers, but we digress.

It makes a slight bit of sense why folks like Trina and Trick Daddy, two former stars at the tail ends of their careers, might let a content-marketing firm pay to post memes on their social media accounts. Both artists are otherwise relegated to making surprise appearances at Miami clubs or filling in when acts drop out of the III Points Music Festival.

But for Ross, the social media sellout is a weird move. His entire ethos revolves around being needlessly rich. Posting weird memes online betrays that: Why would a man at the top of the rap game deign to post embarrassing articles for cash?

More than almost any other contemporary rapper, Ross has based his persona on being needlessly wealthy. He offers listeners a glimpse into a world where menial, day-to-day jobs no longer exist. One-percenters don't hawk knockoff Viagra.

So, on behalf of all of Miami, New Times is formally asking William Leonard Roberts III, the man known to most as Rick Ross, to Cut It the Hell Out. We're saying this because we love you.

We're also saying this because we're pretty sure your Facebook links gave the New Times computer network a Ukrainian computer virus. Thanks, Bawse.