Mark Lane: An April Fools' Day grump explains his stance

People don’t appreciate how the internet has transformed April Fools’ Day. In the online world, every day is April Fools’ Day. Every day.

The only difference is that the daily torrent of falsehoods and concoctions gets unavoidably more torrential that day. And that's just no fun anymore.

In a world less saturated in fakery, the holiday used to be a joshing test of our credulity. It gave amateur satirists a chance to try their skills.

Foolish history: How April Fools' Day started and some pranks that went wrong

For instance, The Daytona Beach Evening News in 1978 ran a pre-Photoshop manipulated photo of a weird-looking horned seal-like beast up on the sand by the Main Street Pier below the headline “Creature crawls ashore.” The accompanying story by John Carter, the esteemed previous columnist in this space, identified it as a rare specimen of Aprillus gullillibus. (Get it!)

The switchboard — yes, there was an actual switchboard with lights then — lit up that day. For years, clips of the April Fools’ article were passed around locally and tacked to barroom walls. Readers wrote to John for more details. It’s in the newspaper, it must be true!

Now, a scarier and far more convincing creature could be whipped up digitally in minutes, posted online, and spread around the world. People would swear by it. Countermeasures would be demanded. Candidates would issue impassioned statements. (Sea monsters used to know their place before Joe Biden became president!) Legislation would be filed. A debunking on Snopes.com would be scoffed at by people who considered themselves truly in the know and not duped by the mainstream media.

Now, in a nation where you can find seemingly normal, productive people who believe the web of bizarre hoaxes that spread under the QAnon umbrella, where an alarming number of people live in a cartoon conspiracyland, it just isn’t funny anymore when you toy with people’s sense of reality by posting something so outrageous as to be obviously untrue. Nothing is too outrageous to be disbelieved online.

Goofy fake internet takes have become weaponized, and there are a surprising number of people out there who have trouble sorting it all out, telling fact from fiction, goof from reality. April Fools' Day doesn't end on April 2.

People used to understand that the space aliens and Bat Boy of the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid were figments of overheated imaginations. (“Bat Boy steals Mini Cooper car for joy ride!”) But in recent years, I’ve had to explain to more than one caller and emailer that The Onion is a humor and parody website — a site where every day is April Fools’ Day — and not a purveyor of objective reality that the corporate media is stubbornly refusing to acknowledge.

Think first: Should you still celebrate April Fools' Day amid coronavirus?

A Fools' Day grump

Those kinds of conversations have turned me into a total April Fools’ Day grump. I dread the holiday.

Now, I see April Fools’ Day as a warning about what happens to people’s sense of reality when they get their news on social media.

I don’t mean to sound like the Information Police here. Yet, I confess that pinning on the Information Police badge is part of what people who report the news and edit and fact-check news stories do. It’s what people who write reported opinion — which is what you are reading here — are hired to do. I hate to rain on the holiday, step on the jokes or spoil the meme. We’re doing our job, that’s all.

And people with different senses of reality hate us for doing that. I know, they write me all the time to tell me.

So happy April Fools’ Day. I’ll celebrate by trying to limit my screen time. Otherwise, consider this a test of your year-round credulity and look at the posting date for everything you see online over the next several weeks.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mark.lane@news-jrnl.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Online, every day is April Fools’ Day | Mark Lane