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Today is April Fools’ Day, though by the time you receive this, you’ve either already discovered that in a humiliating fashion or, I don’t know, knew what date it was yesterday. But every day feels like April Fools’ Day in 2026.
Go online, and there’s no shortage of trickery from bots and bad actors and AI slop posters promising that Bridesmaids 2 is coming. Our inboxes are filled with phishing scams, but so are our text messages. And every other voicemail from an unknown number is from a scammer saying there’s a warrant out for my arrest because I owe a million trillion dollars to the government.
People are already having a lot of trouble separating fact from fiction out there; do we really need a whole day dedicated to brands hawking fake products or popular restaurants lying about closing on Instagram to drive engagement, since that’s what April 1 has become? (If you follow any Australians, then you get these posts on March 31, which is diabolical.)
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April Fools’ Day used to be about practical jokes. Tangible, IRL pranks, like when Jim put Dwight’s stapler in Jello on The Office. We used to be a society.
I was previously grumpy about April Fools’ Day in the disinformation era in a column a few years ago, back when the AI horse with five legs and three sets of teeth was still in the barn. Now things are so, so much worse. Not only are disinformation campaigns increasing in volume, they are also becoming much more sophisticated owing to generative AI.
In other words, they look more real, which means it’s easier to accept (and disseminate) them as such, especially in a rush-to-repost, comment-without-verifying online ecosystem where real news from legitimate sources is buried under the slop pile of AI summaries and ChatGPT-created text and content creators who say whatever they want.
We all like to believe we can’t and won’t be tricked. But we’re all vulnerable, and we’re all, unfortunately, going to have to be increasingly vigilant.
Maybe we can use this as a day as a reminder to exercise our own critical thinking skills, to slow down, to consider the source, to really think about what is being written or said. Give yourself a little test to see how quickly you can identify the April Fools’ content.
As far as I’m concerned, though, we don’t need April to be more tricky. The weather makes a fool out of me enough, thanks so much.
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