Normally when 1 April comes around, I look forward to a bit of playful deception. I’m a Gemini; one of my favourite games is pointing out a random man on the street, telling whoever I’m with not to look at them because he’s my ex-boyfriend and watching them try to analyse how this perfect stranger interacts with me. Usually they are shocked at how he can just walk by without even acknowledging me. When it comes to a practical joke, I’m down. But this year, I felt like I was bracing myself against the onslaught of public April Fools’ content.
The set up of an April Fools’ joke is simple: earnestly ask someone to believe something outrageous and then tell them at the last minute that it was all a ruse. The problem with this setup on the internet is that we don’t always have the time or attention span to wait for the reveal. With a million things vying for our attention, we are often contented with headlines and blurbs that give us just enough of the story to think we know what’s going on. But it’s not just readers who are lazy — media have been known to pick up April Fool’s jokes and create news that bounces through social media until no one is really sure whether or not it was ever real. There is a good chance that even the most well-intentioned jokes can live on way past their due date to be taken as fact somewhere across the Internet.
The other problem with social media is that jokes are not always removed after 1 April. While you may be looking at stories with a critical eye on April Fools’ Day, some of them can trickle over onto your feed later in the week or are reposted when you are not suspecting it. For instance, Twitter informed me today that Marie Kondo would be helping the Metropolitan Museum of Art decide which of their works in storage they should keep or sell. Yes, this is ridiculous, but we also live in a world where funding for the arts is being scrutinised and people love reality TV. Is she qualified to do this, no, but other reality TV stars have overcome much larger qualification discrepancies in order to fill important jobs, where they control nuclear launch codes and make executive orders for a country of more than 300 million.
We live in a world where fake news runs rampant and a lot of questionable and radical decisions have been made by the overwhelming desire people have to shake things up and leave the European Union – so a lot of well-intentioned jokes end up touching on subjects that are actually causing a lot of worry for people. “You got me, but also the world is ending,” kind of kills the humour.
If a joke goes right then a company has made people laugh for a day, but if it goes wrong, it can cause widespread chaos. Google found this out when they added a “Mic Drop” button to Gmail in place of the “Send” button for April Fools’ Day in 2016, which sent recipients a gif of a minion dropping a mike and disabled responses. People’s job interviews, legal emails and serious messages were unintentionally affected by the prank. So, even for those of us who enjoy a bit of trickery, the digital landscape can feel like an overwhelming place for deception. If you would like to trick me in person, that’s fine. Who knows, we may even run into the girl who my ex-boyfriend left me for.