Jokes on you!

Now that we’re celebrating the most comic day of the year, April Fools’, expect to see tons of pranks, jokes, and amusements spread across the entire social media platform.

It’s no news that Filipinos love to fool around, especially to have at least some sort of a breather in this tiring world. We love teasing, new-found jokes and engaging contents yet we don’t want to be at the receiving end of the line.

Yes, we don’t want to be fools.

But how does the line between not wanting to be fooled and believing in the plethora of fake news and disinformation today seem blurry?

This propaganda has been so prevalent that it’s already been normalized. With the real intent to harm someone's reputation, and distort the public's view of something with national significance, it’s poisoning our concept of the truth and facts.

In this national campaign, we’ve seen first-handedly how manipulation has transpired with the widespread and continuous script full of fake news – one attempting to demean someone’s reputation and the other one is trying to revise historical facts. With our access to the internet, such information and messages can be easily fact-checked, but in our reality today, people buy these lies in order to fit their narrative.

Indeed, it’s no longer just a matter of who’s going to be our country’s next leader but battling on amplifying their own truths to best serve their own interests.

This coming April and the following months, let’s not be fools for anyone else but be bearers of the truth. Get out of your comfort zone, make a 360° turn to widen our perspective to the own truths people built.