On Monday morning, NBC’s Today Show broadcast a report on an alleged TikTok challenge that was causing the deaths of those involved: “A gimmick to get views … It’s known as the boat jumping challenge.” ”)», explained the conductor. The report and subsequent article on the program’s website said that “several people have died after attempting the boat jump challenge on TikTok.” The service was viewed by an audience of millions, aired on all NBC-affiliated local channels, and posted on the network’s various local sites.
Dozens of articles followed: People, Forbes, Daily Mail, New York Post and countless other media [in Italia, Repubblica, Fatto, Open, Tgcom24, Leggo, tra gli altri, ndr] they repeated the tale of the Today Showthat at least four people had died directly as a result of this alleged “TikTok challenge.” Right-wing commentators critical of TikTok have amplified the misinformation: “Four people have died from the latest TikTok challenge,” tweeted conservative influencer Ian Miles Cheong in a tweet that received 4.7 million views. “And it’s only four o’clock that the police know about.”
But it was all false. There is no boat jumping challenge on TikTok. Prior to the media frenzy, no boat jumping video had gone viral on TikTok, and no boat jumping hashtag had ever been popular on TikTok, according to the company. And no trending audio on TikTok has ever been related to jumping off boats.
– Read also: They are not all “challenges”
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency issued a statement refuting the story: “On Monday, July 3, a news report broke regarding “rescue workers raising the alarm about a dangerous TikTok trend after recent drownings” in Alabama. We inform you that the information disseminated by the newspaper was inaccurate. The Marine Patrol Division of the ALEA has no records of boating or sea related deaths in Alabama that could be directly attributed to TikTok or a trend on TikTok.
When asked for evidence of the challenge, a spokesperson for the Today Show he declined to answer. A representative of People reported three videos on TikTok, two of which had less than a hundred views and were deleted in the meantime. The third was posted by an account with only 28 followers and only received 63 likes.
Prior to the media cycle exposing the alleged “challenge,” there were fewer than five searches a day for “boat jump” on TikTok worldwide, according to data provided by the company. After the media storm, searches increased by 35,900%.
Several articles on the alleged “boat jumping challenge” also claimed that a 13-year-old boy had died of an alleged “Benadryl sfida” on TikTok, another alleged “challenge” that had been featured on several news sites [anche in Italia, ndr]. Actually, such a challenge it never existed on TikTok and there is no evidence that TikTok played a role in the child’s death referenced in those articles.
“TikTok has been a very lucrative bogeyman over the last few years,” explains Emily Dreyfuss, who runs a course aimed at training managers in news companies on disinformation and media manipulation, at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy of Harvard University. “Our team and countless researchers and journalists across the country have spent a lot of time trying to teach producers, reporters and editors that when a source says something has started on TikTok it doesn’t mean that something is true. I am very disappointed to see that the Today Show he hasn’t learned this lesson yet.”
Since TikTok entered general public use and awareness in 2020, dozens of viral challenges have been wrongly attributed to the app. Last March congressional representatives bombed the CEO of TikTok of questions on non-existent TikTok challenges, repeating false information from news reports. Last year the Washington Post revealed that Facebook had hired a lobbying firm to spread fake TikTok challenge stories in local newspapers of the whole country.
Just one comment
The origin of the “boat jumping challenge” can be traced back to a single comment made by an Alabama resident during a news report. Early July Bobby Poitevint, a reporter from the TV station ABC 33/40 of Birmingham, has received a report of recent boating accidents on a nearby lake. He spoke with Jim Dennis, captain of the Childersburg Rescue Squad, a volunteer organization that provides relief in the event of emergencies and natural disasters.
During the interview, Dennis claimed that it was TikTok that prompted kids to jump off boats, which can be dangerous. “They had a challenge on TikTok,” he told Poitevint. “It’s about making the boat go at high speed and dive off to one side.” Off air Poitevint questioned him for more information, asking for the videos, but Dennis said he didn’t want to “promote” the videos and misquoted the federal law that protects medical information known as HIPAA, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
“It’s like when TikTok had the Tide Pod challenge,” Dennis said during the interview, which was later posted on YouTube. In fact, TikTok has never launched a “Tide Pod challenge,” which was another overrated viral fad (cases were very few), attributed to YouTube at the time, which was born out of a meme in late 2017, which was almost a year before TikTok launched in the US.
Poitevint did not elaborate further. The report aired, including Dennis’ statement attributing the boating deaths to TikTok. “Everything we reported came directly from his interview,” Poitevint said: “We mainly talked about safety on the boat and we allowed him to attribute it to TikTok because if that’s what he saw, he was the first to arrive on site. I’m not a big TikTok user, so I don’t know much about it. The story was about boating safety before the 4th of July celebrations.” When the original service went online the story expanded. Other media have begun to resume it, up to the service of Today Show.
In an interview with the news site AL.com Dennis, who did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Posthe then resized his previous claims that TikTok was the cause of the boating deaths: “Whether it is the reason they died I cannot say. That would be an opinion.” And she added that she “she was inflated.” ABC 33/40 made a clarification on the air and has published a new article, clarifying that ALEA had denied Dennis’ claims. People updated their story after a request for comment from the Washington Postand the Today Show removed the service from the site and posted a item which makes it clear that the challenge does not exist on TikTok.
The cycle of viral false trends
Media taking advantage of parental fears about teen trends is nothing new. The satirical program Saturday Night Live teased this phenomenon in one sketch in 2010 in which comedian Bill Hader pretended to be a local reporter reporting on “souping,” which he jokingly explained was when kids “drink expired soup to get high.”
These troubling teen trends have increasingly been attributed to technology in recent years. For many parents, it’s as if every app on a child’s phone could endanger them or convince them to harm themselves. One studio of 2020 conducted by the research center Pew Research concluded that two-thirds of parents believe their role is more difficult today than it was 20 years ago, citing technologies such as social media and smartphones as the reason. According to a 2020 survey conducted by Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, 58% of parents believe that social media use has a negative effect on teenagers; and 89 percent of parents are concerned about what their kids are coming into contact with on the phone, according to ParentWise, a nonprofit dedicated to child safety.
Before the launch of TikTok in the US, the false trends were mainly attributed to YouTube and Facebook. In 2017 and 2018, the media wrongly claimed that YouTube videos prompted children to sniff condoms, set themselves on fire and eat washing powder capsules. In 2019 the national media, especially the Today Showclaimed that Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube were spreading the “Momo challenge”, in which an image of a terrifying sculpture appeared on a child’s mobile phone screen and prompted him to harm himself.
“Momo is allegedly using messaging platforms like WhatsApp to force young people to participate in dangerous activities, from stabbing people to taking pills to kill themselves,” NBC falsely reported. Police departments issued warnings about the challenge, fueling the media cycle. It was all a lie. There was no evidence that the challenge existed on YouTube, Facebook or WhatsApp, and no deaths were reported. The image referred to as “Momo” is actually a sculpture titled “Mother Bird” created by artist Keisuke Aisawa for Japanese special effects company Link Factory.
The media has been lashing out at TikTok lately as the newest threat to child safety. To address the problem the company has recently announced that it hired public relations expert Zenia Mucha for the new role of head of branding and communications in order to restore the badly damaged image of the company itself.
However, according to Emily Dreyfuss, the issue is much more important than the TikTok PR problem: «Journalists are not doing their job well, with consequences that generate ridiculous political choices, blanket bans and a complete lack of understanding of the role that these platforms play in our children’s lives. Journalists do a huge disservice to our country’s ability to keep people safe and craft regulations that would actually protect children when they muddy the waters so badly with bad information. It’s sloppy work, honestly.”
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(translation by Emilia Dreams)