April Fool’s Day posts were fun - but it’s getting tougher to work out what’s real online, says Lynn News’ columnist

In our weekly From The Newsroom column, Rebekah Chilvers discusses the difficulties in trusting everything that you see online…

It was great to see so many people getting into the spirit of April Fool’s Day on Monday, but as always, it left many of us sceptical about what we were reading online.

And for good reason! While many companies got involved with their own posts that left us scratching our heads, some locals also took their chance to trick their fellow residents.

I particularly enjoyed posts about a cheetah roaming in West Winch, a huge ship being stuck in Hunstanton and another from The Pizza Slice Guy about crust-only pizzas.

If nothing else, I think the imagination that goes into them is brilliant and it definitely brings joy to people when they realise they’ve fallen for the joke.

While I’m all for having a laugh – we absolutely need it with all that is going on in the world at the moment – it has also reminded me of the truly difficult task of discerning what is real and what is not on social media.

As journalists, it’s really important that what we report comes from a trustworthy source or has been verified.

That’s why sometimes it may seem that our reports on crashes or police incidents are not instantaneous, as we want to make sure we have the correct information from the authorities before we share it with the communities who are affected by it.

But what I have also noticed is that some social media platforms are getting worse for disinformation (fake news that is created and spread deliberately) and misinformation (not created intentionally to deceive other people). At this point, I’m sure I’ve seen examples of both on most of the platforms I use.

While some of the fake information may seem relatively harmless – the algorithms have fed me so many posts about Taylor Swift’s current relationship – others are far from it and can influence people in negative ways, or create more division and hate in a world that certainly doesn’t need more of it.

I just wish the social media platforms were doing more to root out these issues. We should all hold them to account and call on them to act - we want to ensure the situation improves and does not get even worse than it currently is.