'April Fools' Day jokes in general don't try to persuade your politics or make you angry or target the negative emotions that are dangerous online,' he told NPR. He says April Fools' Day, with its trend of advertisements masked as jokes, is a perfect time for people to get in the mindset of anticipating and investigating misinformation.

Part of that involves understanding the moments where myths tend to spread, like in the immediate aftermath of a breaking news event or on April Fools' Day, says Dan Evon, the senior manager of education design at the News Literacy Project and a former Snopes fact-checker. But much of that responsibility falls to internet users themselves. There are some resources out there - from news literacy nonprofits to trusted media sources - that can help sort fact from fiction. 'And then the flip side of that is that the tools are not easily available on the technical side to spot them.' 'We're in this moment where it's much easier to make both personalized and individualized, realistic images and audio and increasingly video, and in the hands of many more people,' Gregory said.

He's well-acquainted with the challenges of combating deepfakes as the executive director of WITNESS, a human rights nonprofit whose work involves helping people recognize and respond to deceptive AI. It took Sam Gregory, for example, under a minute to write the text prompt needed to create a fake image of the Easter Bunny for his kids last year, as he told NPR. It can be tough to tell whether something online is real, especially with artificial intelligence making it increasingly easy for anyone to create fake images, video, audio and text. People have celebrated April Fools' Day for centuries with all sorts of jokes and pranks, and while old-school traditions (hello, rubber snakes) remain plenty popular, gags have grown considerably more high tech over the years.Īnd fake news and announcements - whether by a major company, public figure, a random social media user or your childhood best friend - can take off quickly and morph wildly, thanks to social media. Myths and misinformation run rampant on the internet all the time these days, but never more reliably than on April 1.

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