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On 30 March 2016, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni published an op-ed titled College Admissions Shocker! that began as follows: The piece concluded by stating: While many readers immediately picked up on the column's satirical nature, others didn't spot the joke despite the article's heavy-handed absurdity. College Admissions Shocker quickly appeared on the list of top Twitter trends: The Times did little to clarify the ambiguity, tweeting from their verified Op-Ed account: The piece was also shared to their Facebook page as though it were a straightforward news story: Bruni didn't tweet anything directly about the nature of his column, but he did retweet a mention that referred to it as a lampoon: The column was contradicted by content published to Stanford University's own Facebook page on 25 March 2016 noting that they had accepted 2,063 students for the upcoming academic year: While social media users poked fun at those who didn't immediately get Frank Bruni's College Admissions Shocker! joke, the New York Times' presentation of the piece didn't explicitly state it was satire. Some readers might have believed the column to be on the level because the ins-and-outs of elite college admissions remain an arcane subject, the paper published it to social media channels without qualification (and using a standard Times-branded graphic), and both the column and the posts were dated 30 March 2016 (not 1 April, a date that people associate with tomfoolery).
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