While You Were Offline: Hamilton’s Casting Call Doesn’t Go Quite as Expected

The first day of April has, for generations, meant "Don't believe anything you read." In more recent years, it's been expanded to add "... and definitely don't believe anything you read online. Like, seriously." This year, though, April Fools' Day seems to be using the power of the Internet to expand its reach to encompass at least 48 hours. In addition to a ridiculous fake news report about a supermarket chain going out of business—we'll get to that soon enough—there was also this March 31 tweet from PETA about the effects of chicken on your baby's anatomy. So, yes. This is the world we're apparently living in these days. With that in mind, here are the highlights of what you might have missed in the last seven days of our lyin', shameful World Wide Web.

What Happened: When a call for non-white actors to appear in Hamilton was met with outrage, the outrage was met with counter-outrage. Because, you know, the Internet.Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think piecesWhat Really Happened: The news that a New York attorney was considering legal action against producers of Hamilton because of a casting call asking for "non-white" actors sounded like an April Fools' Day joke from the future when it broke at the start of the week, but no. It was actually real, with the complaint targeting the fact that the request might violate the New York City Human Rights Law banning hiring discrimination based on race.

Of course, this kind of story is catnip for media coverage, but it was, as you'd expect, Twitter that had the most honest reaction to the concept: