What People Get Wrong This Week: TikTok Challenges

This week (and every week) people are wrong about dangerous TikTok tasks. This tragic story of a North Carolina teenager who set himself on fire with a aerosol can flamethrower is getting massive media coverage, with news outlets from Chicago to India reporting that Mason Dark was in a TikTok contest when he set himself on fire.

According to the mother of the child, on Sunday Mason and his friends played with a spray can of paint and a lighter. There was an explosion, and the boy received such severe burns that he needed hospitalization.

The mother told WRAL.com: “TikTok has issues… I think kids have been doing it for a long time.” But the alleged problem doesn’t seem to exist.

Fake calls, irresponsible media and moral panic

I don’t blame the mother of an injured child for not understanding the intricacies of online culture – her son could very well be filming a video he intended to post on TikTok – but the many news organizations reporting the non-existent trend as fact are fueling a lingering moral panic .

The name Flamethrower Challenge was attached to a supposed trend, but it appears to be a media invention. Despite the news reports, there is no viral trend for flamethrowers. There is no hashtag. There is no online community. I can only find a handful of videos of people making homemade flamethrowers, and none of them are related and none of them are recent. As a TikTok spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider, “This is not a challenge on our platform.”

The flamethrower test is also not an isolated case. Searching Google News for ” TikTok challenge danger r” returns nearly 10,000 latest news articles, including warnings about allegedly dangerous or deadly online trends. The flamethrower challenge joins the Orbeez challenge , the Momo challenge , the Kool-Aid Man challenge , and countless other “trends” that either never existed or have been grossly misrepresented by the media. Another, the Benadryl Challenge , appears to have recently resulted in the death of a child, though it’s unclear how directly TikTok played a role in the tragedy, given the social media company noted that it blocked searches on the topic for years and never did so. noted that the topic is really in trend. On the other hand, rumors that allergy medications cause a high have been circulating online and offline for years.

Understandably, parents and authorities are concerned about Tiktok’s impact on children. A 2021 Pew survey found that two-thirds of U.S. teens use the app, spending an average of 90 minutes a day on it. No one really knows what impact (if any) the constant flurry of TikTok dance videos and memes will have on evolving minds. Plus: Kids have a well-deserved reputation for doing very stupid things for very stupid reasons. But even if police officers and parents are rightfully wrong and act out of a desire to protect their children and the community, these warnings speak more about their fears and fantasies than about what is actually happening online. Whether well-meaning or not, it’s laziness. And these authority figures create and spread a constant smokescreen of disinformation and fable that makes it difficult to understand and recognize the real danger, hiding it under a pile of nonsense that is too deep for most people to delve into.

Sign in to the US government

It’s one thing for local news outlets and sheriffs to spread misinformation, but the federal government knows better. In September 2022 , the FDA issued a “Chicken NyQuil” alert, describing a particularly ridiculous online joke about cooking chicken in cold medicine as a “recent social media video challenge” when no one actually did it . The warning was picked up by the press, and a disgusting photo posted on 4chan nearly a decade earlier became big news. As a result of the FDA report, searches for the term “NyQuil chicken” have skyrocketed, and I’m willing to bet that at least one person has tried it but wouldn’t have heard of it otherwise.

I can’t understand why the Food and Drug Administration issued this warning out of nowhere. They speak from a position of national authority; shouldn’t they have fact checkers? The tinfoil hat part of my brain thinks this is just a small part of a tangled maze of government conspiracy too hard to figure out without the blackboard and the meth. The rest of my brain thinks someone from the FDA aunt forwarded the fake email and everyone in the office freaked out. (Something similar happened recently in tech, when a government agency sort of randomly decided to warn people about the non-existent threat of “jasjacking”.)

It’s always about money

While the Internet’s moral panic seems to stem mostly from a collective cultural unease about technology, that’s not the only reason that may be driving it. In at least one case, a corporation attempting to harm a competitor ignited a moral storm. In March 2022, The Washington Post reported that Targeted Victory, a marketing firm hired by Facebook’s parent company Meta, deliberately helped spread disinformation to defame Facebook’s main rival TikTok.

Last year, the news across the country reported on an alleged trend called “teacher slap challenge” in which students planned to slap their teacher on a specific day. Although this challenge was completely bogus, it received more response than others, including national press coverage, teacher union warnings , and at least one stern TikTok letter from the Attorney General . Seeing an opportunity, Targeted Victory fanned the flames by helping to post negative articles linking TikTok to “teacher slapping” and other dubious trends, and by spreading and amplifying the message that TikTok is dangerous and Facebook is actually great, which is clearly wrong. .

Disinformation is everywhere. We’re all here skimming the headlines and not reading the articles, letting our prejudices determine our truth, and deliberately misleading shadow actors and algorithms every day. What People Get Wrong This Week aims to uncover and correct common misconceptions, mistakes, and random opinions that I just don’t like. If you notice that someone is wrong on the Internet, let me know .