Ethics and the First of April.

On the Twitters, journalist Lee Billings posted this:

In case anyone was wondering, this is an April-Fools-free zone. Misleading readers is a disreputable practice, even under auspices of fun.

I think this is a position worth pondering, especially today.

Regular readers will have noticed that I indulge in the occasional April Fool’s post.

In fact, I posted another today.

And, today’s April Fool’s post was notable (for me, anyway) in its departure from “surprising news about me and/or my blog” terrain. Instead, I was offering “commentary” on a news story that I made up — fake news that was outrageous but had just enough plausibility that the reader might entertain the possibility that it was true. (Lately, the “real” news strikes me as outrageous a lot of the time, so my suspension-of-disbelief muscles are more toned than they used to be.)

So Lee Billings is, basically, right: I was striving to mislead you, my readers, at least momentarily, for laughs.

Was it unethical for me to have done so? Have I fallen short of my duties to you by engaging in this tomfoolery?

Maybe this comes down to what we understand those duties to be.

I try always to make my own thinking on an issue clear — to explain my stand and to give you reasons for that stand. I also try to set out my uncertainties — the things I don’t know or the places I feel myself torn between different stances.

I actually did this in today’s April Fool’s post, even though I was giving my thoughts on the implications of a proposal that no one has made (yet).

When I’m responding to a news story, I accept that I have an obligation not to misrepresent the claims the story makes. This is not to say that I treat the source as authoritative — indeed, in a number of cases I have expressed my own views of the “spin” of the reporting, and of the details that are not discussed in a news story. And, I include a link to the source so readers can read it themselves, evaluate it themselves, and draw their own conclusions about whether I’ve represented the source fairly.

Today’s post had me responding to a news story that didn’t exist. Clearly, that’s a misrepresentation. Moreover, it means that the link I included to the news story didn’t actually go to the news story — more misrepresentation. However, the diligent reader who actually clicked on that link would be alerted to the fact that there was no such news story before getting into my presentation of the purported proposal or analysis of it.

Maybe this means that readers who were successfully mislead by the post actually fell short of their duties to click those links and read that source material with a critical eye.

It’s possible, though, that I’m wrong about this — that you all want me to break things down so clearly and accurately that you never have to click a hyperlink, that you’d like me to dispense with ironic phrasing (yeah, right!), and so forth. My sense is that readers of this blog have been willing to shoulder their share of the cognitive burden, but if I’m mistaken about that, please use the comments to set me straight.

The other ethical worry one might have (and some have expressed) about today’s post is that my fake proposal might be taken up and advocated as a real proposal — which, in this case, I agree would be bad. If that were to happen, would I be responsible?

I guess I might. But then so might authors of dystopian fiction whose ideas are embraced (and implemented) by people who have a different view of how the world should be. Personally, I think exploring the pitfalls of bad ideas before someone thinks to implement them could help us to actually find better ideas to implement. However, I suppose where bad ideas that get implemented come from is an empirical question.

Does anyone have a good way to get the empirical data that would answer it?