April Fools day pranks generally follow a straight-forward script: offer up a headline that's funny but not altogether implausible. The idea is to suggest something outrageous that is both hilarious and believable, like the BBC claiming that in a far-off land spaghetti grows on trees or Sweden's SVT selling a nylon mesh that can instantly turn black-and-white TVs into colour ones. The hashtag #ArabAprilFools, however, has upended the script in a way that's more depressing than funny.

Instead of tweeting hilarious headlines that could have been taken as true, all of those using the hashtag tweeted things that would have actually been very good news – if only they weren't completely implausible. People tweeted about countries stopping all air strikes or dictators deciding that elections would in fact be better for their citizens, and appended the #ArabAprilFools tag to it, creating a trend that was both poignant and mostly depressing.



The hashtag has been around for a while. Who Said It First traces the first tweet back to April 1 in 2010, when Mahmoud Al Dwairi used it in the exact same way.

The most influential person tweeting this year, however, was Hend, who goes by @LibyaLiberty. Tweeting and retweeting a bunch of straightforward assertions that would otherwise just be happy news, April Fools day managed to turn into a reminder of how sad the state of things in the Middle East still is.