I prefer Premag Radu to Twitter

Radmila Premag was a beauty, judging by the photo that appeared on the Internet, where the wind ruffles her hair while she is standing in a convertible. It is much better known as the inspiration for Jura Stublić's song Heart on the road, which confirms that the young Radmila or Rada loved to drive fast and, perhaps, died that way. Because on the Internet, apart from that picture, there is no other information about its existence. Admittedly, Jura also died in the song, but there he is alive, healthy and singing.

Of course, Rada was invented so that some of the pranksters on Twitter would play with the line "I drove towards the city" by turning it into "I drove to Radu". And the fun could begin. In such situations, Twitter users are divided into those who accept the advantage and start topping up themselves, in a dead serious tone, as it must be in such situations. It is much worse with the other group who naively believe that they have misunderstood the song all their life and are thankful that someone finally "explained" it to them.

The Internet is filled with satire and playing with facts, all of which, like in some sewer, is mixed with healthy and accurate information. Sometimes it's hard to tell when someone is joking and when they're being serious, the truth comes across as mockery and the mockery as truth. If some cataclysm were to occur and destroy most of our digital archives, imagine how some future researchers would reconstruct this era, overjoyed to have deciphered our binary, bizarre records.

Perhaps such a cataclysm is not necessary, it is enough for education to stumble a little and for future researchers to approach the archives with a little more naivety. Stupidity verified in a scientific paper becomes a fact worth quoting. In the absence of living witnesses to point out the lie, it, so documented, will slowly transform into the truth for all time. That is why it is necessary to immediately deny it, with all seriousness, so that future generations do not have the impression that all the idiots lived at this time.

If you think that you are perceptive enough and that such a thing could not happen to you, for example, here is a convenient counter example. Amidst the hubbub of Elon Musk's eventual takeover of Twitter, two guys with boxes in hand appeared in front of the assembled, seasoned journalists, supposedly the forerunners of the hundreds of software engineers fired from Twitter. Journalists flew to report about it, on television and on Twitter itself, only to find out that they were pranksters whose surnames were associated with Twitter stunts. Namely, one of them was named Ligma, which is not a real surname but a gamer's phonetic transcription of the expression "lick my..." To journalists without any knowledge of slang, it was, of course, not unusual, but that's why the gamers were rolling with laughter. A few days later, the layoffs really started, so it was no longer funny to anyone.

In his utterly incomprehensible battle to restore order and exterminate bots on Twitter, Elon Musk demands that any account that parodies someone must be clearly labeled. On the one hand, it kills any idea of ​​comedy that often arises precisely on that border between truth and delusion. On the other hand, in a situation where a fallacy threatens to become the truth, we may be better off without comedy because the consequences are usually very serious.