Yes.

Write. It. Off.

I know you have some hilarious prank planned for the office today, and that’s cool, but there’s nothing more tedious than news websites planting ridiculous stories for the gullible public to lap up.

Sometimes, those stories can really backfire, with the majority of the human population seemingly unable to use basic human logic (and Google) to check the veracity of anything.

The death of the news website April Fools’ Day prank also has to do with another scourge – fake news. Just ask the Daily Maverick’s editor, Branko Brkic, who published a story earlier today titled ‘Goodbye, April Fools’.

Every year, the site would publish something outrageous on April 1 (Oscar Pistorius running a marathon in North Korea, politicians switching between parties and the like), but then it started to fizzle out:

In 2016, we started to get so exhausted by the crazy events in a crazy country in a crazy world that we simply cancelled the April Fools’.

In 2017, the mess in the country around 1 April was so great, that we didn’t dare add to it.

In 2018, we didn’t even bother.

It is 2019 now, and fake news outnumbers the real stuff. The entire reality is waiting to be replaced by another, evil one, as soon as galloping imaging, animation and video technologies enable it.

That’s actual fake news he’s talking about, not the sort that Donald Trump doesn’t like because it’s critical of him.

The kind of fake news that undermines the foundations of democracy:

And this is not a fun thing perpetrated by amateurs. This is a concentrated effort by state actors hell-bent in their mission to reverse the march of global democracies and freedoms that come with it: the freedom to live a meaningful life, the freedom to love and feel fulfilled, the freedom to exist in a world where decency is a norm and not a swear word.

Fake news is but a tip of this iceberg that threatens to crush our civilisation. And yet, they are so blindingly corrosive.

As he sat at his desk, Brkic realised it was time to put the tradition to bed once and for all:

In truth, this is the day when I can’t in good conscience add to the confusion created by the professionals. The years-in-the-making crime of relativising truth and murdering reality has not only wounded nations and crippled the future for millions, it has also killed any pleasure of lying deliciously on the morning of the first day of April.

It is sad, but it must be done.

Goodbye, April Fools’.

Fine by me.

Looks like Food24 didn’t get the memo, with their “SAB to shut down SA craft beer industry?” story, but to each their own.

May your office prank work like a charm, though. We are rooting for you.

[source:dailymaverick]