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Imagine that. Communist Google has no humor. Who knew!

Google cancels April Fools’, celebrates ‘fact-checking day’ instead

1 Apr, 2021 [on.rt.com]

Google has canceled its usual April Fools’ pranks for a second year in a row, citing the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. It will still celebrate the much less entertaining “international fact-checking day” on April 2.

“With much of the world still grappling with serious challenges, we feel we should again pause the jokes for April Fools' Day this year,” an internal memo seen by several tech news sites on Wednesday read. Last year, the company also canceled its planned pranks “out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Google has a long-standing tradition of sometimes elaborate April Fools’ pranks. It’s ‘Mic Drop’ prank in 2016, for example, added an animated gif of a Minion character to emails, a prank that backfired when users accidentally sent the image alongside important business emails. Other pranks allowed users to play Pac-Man and Snake on Google Maps, announced a Dutch app enabling communication with tulips, and posted a job listing for a dog engineer.

After every party comes a hangover, and April 2 marks “International Fact-Checking Day,” a day dreamed up in 2017 by journalists and academics at the London School of Economics. Google took the opportunity this year to boast of its AI-powered efforts to fight Covid-19 “misinformation.”

The tech giant also announced that it would contribute $29 million to set up an EU-wide fund to “fight misinformation and support fact checking.” In a blog post, it said that it wants to recruit academics and nonprofits to “access accurate information, and sort facts from fiction.”

Fact-checking, however, is a contentious idea. Facebook and YouTube – a sister company of Google – have both teamed up with third-party fact-checkers to review potentially misleading political posts, but these fact-checkers have been accused of bias of their own. In the US, the general public does not trust the media to fact-check political claims, while 70% of Republicans believe that fact-checking favors the other side.

Krunoslav 9 Apr 1
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While I may agree with iThink in principle the real tragedy of wokeness is in the lack of creativity captured by the first word in the OP, imagine. Wokeness is humorless and unimaginative. Humor requires humility to be appreciated and that is the point of April fools day. It reminds us that we can all be fools.

0

I don't like and have never appreciated so called practical jokes. They are designed and intended to cause or to create minor (in some cases a bit more than minor) injury both physically and emotionally. I don't like the notion much less the otherwise inexcusable activities associated with "April fools day".

It simply has never seemed "funny" to me to see someone getting shocked, frightened, injured, embarrassed, humiliated...for any reason and April fools pranks have no relationship with reason itself.
This is a rare example whereby I agree with Google.
April fools day serves no good purpose - get rid of it!

iThink Level 9 Apr 1, 2021

You are missing the point my friend. Practical jokes day is a controlled day when one day in the year it is allowed as a social outlet. It is called April's Fool day because you have to be a fool to fall for it, therefore people are less likely to do it at random days. It severs a very good purpose to keep the community healthy. I assure you "fact checking" day does the opposite. Off course communist at google cannot allow anything they can't control.

I am not missing the point at all. I disagree with your analysis of "Practical jokes day". It is hardly controlled and folks prone to carrying out practical jokes at the expense of others lack self restraint and they tend to get sadistic pleasure seeing others victimized.

While I do appreciate social and political satirical and sarcastic writing (Babylon Bee is an example of that) because it serves a purpose. It reveals the faults, flaws and potential harms that result from short sighted political policy.

Practical jokes are carried out always catching victims unaware - they make innocent victims in their outcomes. I don't like them - I don't like people who do them - I never liked them and I never will.
I agree w/Google on this one.

@iThink "Practical jokes are carried out always catching victims unaware - they make innocent victims in their outcomes. I don't like them - I don't like people who do them - I never liked them and I never will."

I agree with that. However it seems to me that they are part of human condition and if you don't reserve a day in a whole year for them, they will spill over in other nastier ways.

@Krunoslav thanks but I disagree - human beings have many negative and destructive impulses. Not the least of which is the impulse to kill other human beings. We do not (not yet anyhow) have a day set aside whereby people are able to "purge that impulse and to do so free of legal consequence.
I think the movies in "The Purge" franchise illustrate the folly in that idea.
There are certain aspects to being human that are better restrained than expressed. "Practical Joking" IMHO is violence. It is often NOT harmless. To the contrary it all too frequently leads to injury - sometimes fatal injury.
We - you and I - simply disagree on this and I'm ok with that.

@iThink Fair enough.

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