PETERS: April Fools’ Day and the age of ‘fake news’ paranoia

This is the information age. Anything remotely bizarre or outlandish that we try to sell as a joke on April 1 can easily be debunked by a quick Google search or browse through Wikipedia.

It’s not like the BBC in 1957 fooling its viewers with footage of Swiss people harvesting spaghetti from trees, or Sports Illustrated’s story on Sid Finch, a pitcher who could throw a baseball 168 miles per hour.

Far-fetched tales are easily debunked.

At the same time, this is the age when more and more people seem to have already lost faith that what they are seeing portrayed in mainstream media is true.

It’s the same with social media. We read every piece of information tinged with so much skepticism, it leads to the default position that none of them could be true.

This muddled context has led many to conclude the only true facts are the ones they want to believe, not the ones that are empirically provable.

A further subset descends into a world of delusion that convinces them — as one example — that a group of truckers parked in downtown Ottawa could stay indefinitely and could depose and replace the democratically-elected government.

It’s all fed by that understanding that facts are relative.

So if that many people are already crying ‘fake news’, should we be contributing to it by publishing actual fake news, even if it is just one day a month? Or is April Fools’ Day little more than some harmless fun?

I tend to think the latter, if only because so many people are in on the joke.

And jokes are so, so important — no matter what Will Smith says.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

by James Peters

PETERS: April Fools’ Day and the age of ‘fake news’ paranoia

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