April Fool's goes viral
The perils of doing satire on the internet
On Easter Monday, I opened my laptop to prepare for a Zoom call. I checked X to fill in a spare five minutes and noticed the date - the 1st of the month, April Fool’s Day.
Australians have a long tradition of posting pranks on April Fool’s Day, both at mass media level and on social media. My favourite was a popular bakery posting that they were planning to healthify their famous cinnamon scroll recipe by swapping out butter for dairy-free margerine, and sugar for stevia. The comments section popped off, mostly with laughing emojis from people who clocked the date, and a few sad face emojis with bitter comments of complaint.
Traditionally, posters either declare April Fool’s the next day, or let the comments and the date do the big reveal for them.
So I thought to myself, April Fool’s - what’s the most outlandish thing I can post? At 9:38am I typed into my browser:
BREAKING: The Australian government has recalled all mRNA Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and promised compensation to all Australians for human rights abuses incurred by illegal lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
As if the government would do the right thing and admit error without being absolutely forced. I hit ‘post’, got myself a coffee and jumped onto my Zoom call.
When I reopened X an hour or so later, the first thing I noticed was a slew of comments calling out the date - April Fool’s!
But there were a handful of commenters who took it literally, and some who were quite offended, thinking my jab at the government was aimed at the vaccine injured. Nothing could be further from the truth, but context collapses on the internet, so I clarified:
1. It's the 1st of April in Australia.
2. The point of this was to bring attention to what the government SHOULD do. They protect pharma, not the people.
3. The government is the joke.
I also hadn’t expected the post to get so many views, as my account has been suppressed since last June (speech not reach!) and I had presumed that the April Fool’s comments immediately under the post, along with the date and the lack of any verification (no supporting article, nothing) of the satirical post would limit its spread.
I then left the house without my phone, which is broken from having been dropped into the ocean over the weekend. When I returned mid-afternoon and refreshed my browser, the post had been shared over 1K times, and viewed over 150K times.
Most people got the point and commented about how good it would be to have a government that put people before pharma and profits. I agreed, and linked to a Covid Vaccine Injury Class Action where people can donate to force the issue with the government (not that anyone should have to do this, but here we are in reality, where the government is captured and only a relative few are prepared to do anything about it, and those relative few need financial support to pull it off).
But I wondered - should I delete my April Fool’s post for the few that didn’t catch the gag? By now so many people had seen the original that I decided against deleting it, thinking that it would be better to leave it up with all the April Fool’s disclaimers in the comments and in my timeline. Some savvy users added Community Notes, which I rated ‘helpful’ and reposted.
I also jumped into the comments highlighting the date wherever I saw the post being reposted uncritically.
Yet, it continued to be re-posted, both as April Fool’s and as literal news well into the evening.
A few reflections on this:
Perhaps one simply cannot do satire on the internet. The context collapse is too pervasive, and the impulse to either get offended by everything or to share news without reading it properly is too strong. Some said it wasn’t funny. Well it’s dark satire. It should make you think (and maybe wince). Are we only to criticise the government in earnest literal manifestos? Some commenters seem to think so. After this hooha, I suppose I will give up on the satire and go back to playing it straight at all times, or else I might write *THIS IS SATIRE* on satirical posts so that people know it’s satire.
Freaking out over satire on the internet plays into the censorship industrial complex, which wants to create an internet environment where only a narrow range of approved facts are allowed to be posted, and nothing else. I still think that sunlight is the best disinfectant, so if you don’t like a post the best thing to do is comment on it with your opinion. If you’re not sure if a post is true, comment with a question. Also, I think we must try to refrain from taking the least charitable reading of any given post, which again, only benefits the censorship czars, who are all too happy to penalise accounts for posting things that someone, somewhere didn’t like.
When it comes to satire, X’s Community Notes does a way better job than the ridiculous fact-checkers, which cannot take a joke and don’t want you to either. I appreciated the quick thinking of the posters who added Community Notes to highlight that yes, this is a parody post, but no, that doesn’t mean the government is pure as the driven snow or that the vaccines are safe and effective.
It doesn’t matter who posts whatever it is you’re reading. READ IT PROPERLY BEFORE YOU REPOST IT. If any of the people who shared this post as ‘news’ had clicked through to read the post in full, the first thing they would have seen was an April Fool’s disclaimer immediately underneath. If they’d have clicked through to my profile, they’d have seen multiple posts explaining the date, what was intended with the post, and the Community Notes. If they’d have looked for the supporting news item, they’d have very soon found there wasn’t one. I don’t care who posts the thing you want to share. Never believe anything you read without verifying it. The ‘fact checkers’ rely on you not clicking through to sources much of the time. Mainstream media sometimes make claims without having even read the source, let alone linking it (such as here and here). And of course, anything goes on social media. A post declaring the vaccines banned in Japan last week is case in point. A quick google revealed that it was a misreporting of the actual story - Covid vaccines are no longer tax payer funded in Japan.
It’s over 10 years since Justine Sacco became person zero of internet shaming over a misinterpreted joke on the internet, and culturally it seems that we have not moved past this yet. In 2013, the New York-based PR executive tweeted a poorly executed joke before boarding a flight from London to South Africa. By the time she landed 11 hours later, her post had been retweeted thousands of times, the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was trending, and she was the main character in a viral Buzzfeed blog. From there, she became an international scapegoat, lost her job, and was eventually featured in Jon Ronson’s excellent book on the dark side of internet culture, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. It was a case of context collapse in the extreme, where a post meant to criticise ignorance and racism was inverted, taken to mean the exact opposite. In my case, the response was nowhere near as extreme, but the number of people committed to reading an obvious swipe at the government as a swipe at vaccine injured people (I never mentioned vaccine injury by the way, and I wouldn’t in this context) surprised me. I would love to see the internet culture grow up in this regard.
I was also accused of simply posting for attention. That didn’t cross my mind at 9:38am on Monday morning, but seeing as I have your attention now, here are some ways you can support the people that the government has abandoned and maybe tip the scales towards justice:
Share and/or donate to Australia’s first Covid Vax Injury Class Action
Follow and support groups that are community organising and building parallel networks, such as Discernable, Stand Up Now Australia, the Aligned Council of Australia and One Humanity Movement.
Support independent media by sharing content you like and purchasing subscriptions if you have the means. The media is meant to hold the government to account. Mainstream media is not consistently doing that. So support the independents who are.
Thankfully, it seems that most people got the gag and it got the conversation going, which was really the point. This morning the post has almost 700K views, 3.4K reposts and over 770 comments. Join the thread on X.
Update: I like this comment. It’s important to people.
To support my work, make a one-off contribution to DDU via my Kofi account and/or subscribe. Thanks!
I loved your tweet. And it took about 3 seconds to realise it was 1 April. But it pushed the narrative in a positive direction…that was priceless. Just to contemplate the government taking such action was uplifting. Don’t let the satire police stop you. We are truly lost without humour!
In an inversion of an inversion, your April Fool's joke might actually wake a few more people up from their slumber. Humor undercuts propaganda and lies in curious ways and you achieved something powerful with your post.