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MediaApril 1, 2019

The worst April Fools ‘jokes’ of 2019

Staff Writer
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Is it time April Fools was abandoned as a public holiday? The efforts so far for 2019 have been dismal. Alex Braae casts his eyes over the worst efforts.

In this morning’s edition of The Bulletin, I put out a call for good April Fools jokes. “If you see any that are actually funny, please feel free to send them through,” I said. Normally calls for feedback come back with dozens of emails. I am yet to receive a single one today.

Almost every effort has seemingly missed the mark – an April Fools gag has to be all of plausible, outlandish, and funny all at the same time. They should be the ultimate pieces of clickbait – people should be compelled to see if they’re really true. But this year, it feels much more like brands and publications are just doing low-effort shit-posting instead. They’ve mostly just come across as a bit tragic.

So who has elicited the loudest groans of despair? Here are some leading contenders.

NZ Rugby signing Jason Momoa and The Rock

If anything, the photoshopping on this makes it less plausible, not more. It’s hardly the work of a deep-fake artist.

It’s understandable why NZ Rugby would want Dwayne The Rock Johnson. He’s a former American footballer, and was an elite athlete during his WWE days. As well as that, with Sonny Bill Williams likely to retire in the next couple of years, the All Blacks will need a new player to fill the role of ‘massive dude who is also a good human’. So that makes sense.

But would Jason Momoa really be on their target list? After utterly misinterpreting the meaning and kaupapa of the haka, is Jason Momoa really the role-model that NZ Rugby wants All Blacks to be?

Dominos release spaghetti pizza

A mere 18 months ago, everyone felt the need to have an opinion on spaghetti pizza, thanks to then-PM Bill English making it a core feature of his re-election campaign. But where is Bill English now? Not walk-running the country, that’s where.

This one almost feels like it could be a real thing Dominos are trying to get going – this is after all a company that sells pizza with potato wedges on top, and a spaghetti pizza would be exceptionally cheap to produce in bulk. My theory is that this isn’t an April Fools gag at all. It’s just something they would be doing anyway, but if everyone hates it they can roll it back in a matter of hours.

Kiwi Onion Dip ice-cream

Actually, it’s not Kiwi Onion Dip at all – they presumably couldn’t get the rights to the name, so went for the much less impactful ‘NZ Onion Dip.’ Have you ever eaten NZ Onion Dip? I haven’t, and I’m willing to bet it’s disgusting, unlike the classic Kiwi Onion Dip.

Pineapple lumps on pizza

My theory about the spaghetti pizza absolutely does not apply here, literally nobody wants or needs this to be in the world.

Sal’s Pizza do something something pineapple post

It’s 9.30am on a Monday, and you’ve only just realised everyone is doing April Fools jokes, and you just have to put literally any piece of content into the world, and so you come up with…. this.

Bedazzle your Vayjay(zzle) with Libra

Perhaps this one is acceptable as a searing indictment on consumer culture that simultaneously encourages women to hide or be ashamed of their periods, while also ruthlessly selling them solutions at ever increasing prices. But I don’t think it is.

Pic’s Peanut Butter do Easter Eggs

This one just feels like too much of a wink and nudge – like they’re daring you to check the date when you see it. I’ll admit, if they were using small eggs, I would have absolutely been sucked in, though more than anything out of a sense of actually wanting to eat that.

The ODT pretends an iconic fountain is coming back

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This one was actually quite good, but was perhaps taken slightly too seriously. They managed to slip some up to date references in there (e-scooters!) while also maintaining an overly buttoned down tone throughout. It is quite possible that someone at Morning Report was fooled by it, because Guyon Espiner revealed on air that the Dutch consultancy firm mentioned in the story didn’t exist, which someone would have had to look up.

Max Key leaves the country

Wait, this one is actually real?

Keep going!
Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

MediaMarch 31, 2019

Facebook ban: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

Guest writer
Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

If Facebook’s announcement that it’ll ban praise and support for white nationalism and separatism sounds familiar, that’s because it is, writes Paul Brislen for RNZ.

Nearly two weeks after the terrorist attack in Christchurch was aired live on Facebook, the company has finally responded in public. From next week it will implement a ban on “praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism on Facebook and Instagram”.

The company will also direct any searches for key terms “associated with white supremacy” to a non-profit organisation Life After Hate that helps pull people out of hate speech groups.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because sadly it is. This is not the first time Facebook has declared it will take action in this way.

In April 2016, Robert Godwin, a 74-year-old grandfather, was shot and killed in Cleveland, Ohio having been chosen at random by a killer who broadcast it live on Facebook.

At the time CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook’s annual developer conference, “We have a lot of work [to do], and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening”. In May of 2017 the company announced plans to add 3000 more staff to review user content to help battle violent videos.

Not much has changed. Thursday’s announcement sounds awfully hollow in light of the lack of action since 2016 and does little to assuage anyone’s concerns about the company and its ability to self-regulate.

Facebook Live will continue to be unmonitored and unmanaged. Having a room full of content moderators is a good step forward but given the vast amount of video footage that is uploaded every second of the day, Facebook must invest more in machine learning and automated systems that can identify and root out such content before any human sees it.

As digital forensics professor at the University of California, Berkeley Dr Hany Farid told Nine to Noon such systems already exist and are used widely. That Facebook and its ilk do not automatically tag Facebook Live content and remove it as soon as it becomes apparent it is objectionable remains unacceptable. If the killer had used copyright music in his video I am sure Facebook would have blocked the video immediately, but the slaughter of innocents apparently goes unnoticed.

Let’s see whether those of us who report extremist views will ever get anything more than an automated response that says “this does not breach our terms and conditions”.

Let’s see whether Instagram removes Alex Jones and InfoWars from its platform. Let’s see whether searching for Ku Klux Klan does indeed redirect to Life After Hate.

Facebook hasn’t addressed the company’s unwillingness to do what is required under New Zealand law (the Harmful Digital Communications Act in this case, but also the Privacy Act where it’s butted heads with the Privacy Commissioner repeatedly) and simply tightening up its own community standards isn’t going to make a huge difference at this point.

If the company was serious it would switch off Facebook Live immediately while it worked out how to tag videos. It would implement automated tagging of all videos uploaded to the site so that any which slip through the net can be found and removed swiftly. It would pay attention to local laws and act accordingly – it already does this in Germany for instance and there’s no reason why it can’t abide by New Zealand law when used by New Zealand users. And it would make it easier and more straightforward for users to report objectionable content.

But of course, all this costs money and doesn’t add to shareholder value, which is why it is vital that New Zealand lead the way and introduce regulation that requires Facebook and other tech giants to do the right thing, to abide by New Zealand law and to enable users to report objectionable material as soon as it is posted. To do that, we’ll need regulations and probably a huge upweighting in terms of the fines we can issue and, I would suggest, personal liability for senior executives.

Anything less is just a public relations exercise, just like this announcement from Facebook.

*Paul Brislen is a technology commentator