r/AteTheOnion • u/_WeSellBlankets_ • 5d ago

Did Yahoo publish an April Fool's article about Warren Buffett purchasing Tesla before realizing it was a joke? There are links to it, but it's been removed from their site.

https://imgur.com/a/Utdfd3W
517 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

119

u/Linkage006 5d ago

Chomp Chomp Chomp

60

u/FellKnight 5d ago

"we totally knew" and were in on the joke. heh trust us.

Honestly, it makes me wonder if Yahoo is using AI to scour the internet for news and repackaging it for profit, and this was the first April 1st since the AI became reliable enough to do this.

93

u/Firm_Basil1671 5d ago

They totally did. AOL did the same.

27

u/ManateeSheriff 5d ago

I know a bit about this -- Yahoo has a number of deals to scrape content from other sites. Most of the content posted on Yahoo News is just pulled from other publications and never reviewed or vetted before getting published. AOL (who has the same parent company as Yahoo) does something similar.

Most likely this was published on the other site as a joke, pulled automatically into Yahoo's content farm, and regurgitated onto the site. Once there were enough user complaints, someone went in and manually deleted it.

I was involved in implementing this on another site, and have a number of goofy stories about inappropriate content getting sucked in and published. It's just the ongoing enshittification of Internet content.

9

u/FellKnight 5d ago

well shit, I literally suggested this in my last comment.

I motion to make April Fools a weekly event then to fuck with these lazy people trying to "scrape" content without editing.

17

u/inderisme 5d ago

I totally fell for it initially but after reading the whole article, I figured it was a joke. It's been taken down.

4

u/jamesinboise 5d ago

I read to the bottom of the article where it stated that it was satire, a fake article, she an April fools joke

2

u/FnHeck 5d ago

Got me but then I remembered oh yeah.