by 
With April Fools’ Day over, people have once again gone back to blindly accepting whatever they read on the internet.
For one day a year, people look at unsourced and unverified online articles with a jaundiced, careful eye, keen not to look utter twats by being taken in by some made-up baloney.
And then they very next day they go right back to accepting the first thing they see which sounds vaguely like something they would believe as absolute gospel truth, including articles about chemtrails, vaccines, homeopathy, 9/11, international conspiracies by bankers, jews, muslims and any other group they don’t happen to be a part of themselves, and pretty much absolutely everything produced by Another Angry Voice.
Effectively fact-free articles from the Independent, The Daily Mail and Russia Today are also disconcertingly popular.
Often these positions can be summarised by putting a quote on a picture of someone famous, usually Albert Einstein because he was dead clever so it must be true.
Conspiracy theorist Simon Williams told us that he hates April Fools’ day because people actually ask him to verify his claims about the international bankster cartel instead of just blindly sharing the stuff which the voices in his head tell him without question.
“I spend a lot of time making attractive text-on-a-picture sharable images about the Royal Family and senior members of the government which for 364 days a year get passed around like Pokeman cards at an early 2000s comprehensive,” he told us.
“And then one day people ask questions like ‘Is this true’ and ‘Have you any evidence for this?’, which completely screws me over.
“I mean, asking for evidence? You bastards. The clown who appears in my bathroom mirror tells me this stuff, and he’s a reliable source.
“Just share it and don’t ask any questions like you do the rest of the year, okay?”
Internet users are reminded to be careful of what they read – and to remember the important rule that if you can summarise a complex position with a single line of text and an attractive picture, it’s probably not true any day of the year and not just on April the 1st.
