The concept of April Fools’ Day can be tricky to explain to people from cultural backgrounds that don’t have a tradition of celebrating it, especially in the online age. After all, why would anyone want to deliberately spread falsehoods about themselves or their businesses on any occasion? The exact origins of April Fools’ Day are unknown, but the tradition most likely started becoming popular in Great Britain in the 1700s.
Is it celebrated internationally? Many non-western countries definitely do appear to celebrate April Fools’ Day or an approximation of it (although not necessarily on April 1st.) For instance, Iranians have played pranks on either April 1st or April 2nd since the year 536 BC. This suggests that the idea of a holiday day for “tricks” may be widespread enough for cultures to understand why the Western world has embraced a day of deliberate misinformation.
Does April Fools’ Day create issues for news reporting? April Fools’ Day media misinformation appears to have begun in 1957, when the UK television series Panorama showed a fake documentary of farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees. In a way, this story shows how far both information and misinformation have come since then. In that year, spaghetti was still a reasonably new food in the UK. Naturally, fewer British people would have known the source of pasta in a time with a less developed education system and, of course, no Internet.
Duping postwar British people into the origin of a new food is relatively harmless. But has April Fools’ Day adjacent fake news caused any major incidents? Yes, which shows how one person’s harmless prank can become another’s war provocation.
On April 1st, 1986, an Israeli intelligence agent reported that a Lebanese leader, Nabih Berri, had faced an assassination attempt as a joke. Unfortunately, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin failed to realize that it was a joke, and went on to interrupt a session of the government’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee to announce the news. This then led an Israeli radio station to twice broadcast the news as genuine. Berri’s spokesperson then condemned Israel for making the joke. The intelligence agent who’d originated the joke faced legal action.
It appears that nothing as serious has occurred between two nations since the Israeli-Lebannon prank misfire. But there are instances of April Fools’ Day jokes misfiring in cultures that may not embrace the spirit of the day.
For instance, in Jordan, 2010, the newspaper Al-Ghad ran a front page news story that stated that space aliens had landed in the desert town of Jafr. The result of this false news in the town of Jafr itself was significant. It led to a breakdown in communications. People ran terrified into the streets. And parents kept their children home from school. In fact, the town’s mayor, Mohammed Mleihan, later said that he almost evacuated the entire town.
The Jafr story may sound shocking and silly to many. But it demonstrates the potential danger that fake news around April Fools’ Day still poses. And it’s important to remember that not so long ago, Western communities were suffering from similar incidents, such as when Orson Welles terrified America with his radio adaptation of War of the Worlds in 1938.
Luckily, in both the 1986 Israeli-Lebanon and the 2010 Jafr April Fools’ Day incidents, no one was seriously hurt. But will this always be the case? The January 6th insurrection in Washington DC was fueled by misleading claims about the 2020 Election and QAnon conspiracy theories. In a world where extremists will storm the US Capitol, murder police officers, and end up getting shot because of fake news, is it so hard to imagine someone taking a tasteless April Fools’ Day joke to heart and causing violence?
So what is the future of April Fools’ Day? It appears to be here to stay, especially with companies trying so hard to get attention at any opportunity, with April Fools’ Day being a prime opportunity. But of course, the entire world will not always be in on the joke, as the Jafr incident shows.
There is a slight chance that April Fools’ Day will fade away, though. For instance, in 2020, many decided to skip April Fools’ Day pranks due to the 2020 pandemic. Additionally, there is evidence that some nations are trying to reject April Fools’ Day, possibly due to its supposed associations with Western culture. For instance, in 2012, the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune stated the following about April Fools’: “Today, more and more people think it is alien to our values because it is based on deception and victimisation.” This source does not state that the Western associations of April Fools’ Day make people think negatively of it. But could this be the case? After all, the people of Pakistan spent years under the rule of the British Empire. It is easy to believe that many within this nation want to rid themselves of the culture of their former oppressors. (But of course, this is technically speculation, as the source does not explicitly state that April Fools Day is a Western tradition.)
The saying, “Don’t believe everything you read,” has never been more important. Hopefully, people will keep that in mind this April Fool’s Day.
Photo by Gene Lester/Getty Images
