April Fool's day 2025
The internet gets just weirder. But actually the reality gets weirder, spreading into the internet.
This is a write-up of an experience about how my own reality got bent.
Some random X session in March
I still have my Twitter account. From time to time I sign in there when I need to read a Twitter thread, which you cannot read anymore fully when not being signed in.
So a few weeks ago, exactly this happened and I start browsing my feed afterwards. The X feed nowadays is totally confusing. It’s not visible why some weird tweets show up.
So a lot of shit gets thrown into your face. Weird Memes. Some trash from trash-post accounts I had been following when X was still Twitter back then. But also other stuff. Some interesting creators with their new-to-me IT topics. But also weird videos like this one1 pop up.
It shows a woman getting detained on the street in broad daylight.
Nazi vibes. As a german, you’ve learnt in school how our ancestors treated the jews. I see no difference.
But in the tweet there is no reference, name, context, just this video and some emotionalised click-bait writing like “Look where we’ve gone. It starts now in America.”.
Things were unclear. And by the nature of the click-bait I assumed this video was either staged, not happening in USA, years old, maybe even part of a film or even AI generated.
I expected the odds of being real were quite low.
April Fool’s day
A few years back, April Fool’s day was a firework of weird jokes and the energy IT companies invested in those was huge. In the IT department I worked for, we even written an ApFD (April Fool’s Daemon), ejecting the DVD drive from time to time during April Fool’s day.
This years April Fool’s? My April Fool’s detector was broken. I even questioned most of the real news. It was indistinguishable of the real news. The day after, I told my friends and most could resemble.
The only joke I got while watching, was some german chef making white kimchi2.
What do you remember as a good April Fool’ joke in 2025? Was your detector broken, too?
Today
Today, I’ve seen the most recent XKCD. Even for me, an occasional XKCD reader, the tone was really weird and even in those few sentences you’d get the seriousness of this comic.
I definitely did not get the point, so I checked the sub line:
Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.
So, I just googled the name. To my suprise there was a matching Wikipedia article.
I was wrong and I did not know until today.
Rümeysa was officially alleged to support Hamas. I do not want to make any statement about the Hamas and Israel conflict and neither want to express support for any side. I want to point out that detaining someone with such a procedure has nothing to do with a constitutional state.
In what world do we live in? What’s reality? I’ve learnt today that dismissing something because of small doubts and therefore just ignoring it, might be bad. … and this learning might be bad, too.
To Rümeysa: I wish you all the strength to go through this and I hope you get out of this as soon as possible.