Details about what happened to the RMS Titanic vary depending on who is telling the story.
Iceberg found after colliding with luxury liner 11:40 p.m.according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or 11:35 p.m., which is what the exhibit on ships in New York claims.UK’s Royal Museums in Greenwich announce cost of ship of doom 1,503 people While taking their lives, the Smithsonian Institution in the United States claims: 1,522 passengers and crew Died.
Historians attribute this discrepancy to factors such as incomplete ticketing lists and rush numbers sent using weak signals. But rough strokes are fine. All credible experts agree that the Titanic sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912, less than a week after its maiden voyage.
Over a century later, TikTok is now in a completely different version. “The Titanic never sinks!!!” wrote one user in a post that garnered more than 11 million views before being taken down earlier this year.
In the short-form video app, as musty rumors merge with new misinformation and manipulated content, new lawsuits are being filed against long-established facts about the crash. This demonstrates TikTok’s powerful ability to instill revisionism in even the most deeply researched events.
One 32-second post opens with a dramatic black-and-white drawing of the Titanic hustling over a man-studded wave to the tune of an eerie synthesizer. A man in a hoodie and a backwards-facing baseball cap is crudely framed on a green screen and (with his screaming face emoji) the familiar “Titanic didn’t really sink”. making a claim. Facing the camera, he repeats the so-called “swap” theory, which has been thoroughly disproved. The undersea remains are said to belong to the Olympic, an old and dilapidated sister ship to the Titanic, which sank in an attempted insurance fraud.
Another video presents a conspiracy theory that the shipwreck was a “hit job” ordered by financier JP Morgan (real name John Pierpont Sr.) to eliminate opponents of the Fed.
Skepticism about the Titanic has frustrated researchers on the Titanic since it sank. And December marked the 25th anniversary of the release of the 1997 film Titanic. The film is a high-priced, heart-pounding blockbuster of spellbinding romance on top of a fictionalized depiction of disaster.
The celebration also included the re-release of the film in theaters just before Valentine’s Day. There was also a flurry of reports about James Cameron’s work. with scientists and stuntmen To settle a lingering debate about the film’s pivotal scene: how many of the doomed lovers can survive above a floating door in freezing sea water. (Tests showed he could actually manage two.)
Cameron’s experiment seemed to fuel numerous TikTok conspiracy theories about the real Titanic. Many of them were posted as witty online articles, pieced together with a collection of speculation and misinterpreted evidence.
“It’s kind of depressing to see so much junk out there,” said Charles A. Haas, founder of the Titanic International Society and who spent 60 years studying the ill-fated ship. . He co-authored five of his books on the subject, and he dived twice to the sinking site, debunking countless conspiracy theories. “I feel like one of the few voices screaming into the sound of a hurricane.”
The Titanic International Society is one of several historic organizations around the world dedicated to Titanic research and has accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but not on TikTok. Haas said the decision was partly driven by concerns that TikTok’s reputation as a “rough and hairy place” would taint serious research shared on the platform. .
“If you have a great filet mignon and wrap it in stinky fish, the filet mignon doesn’t smell as good after a while,” he said.
TikTok is just the latest trash can with false stories about the Titanic. This story started circulating as soon as the Titanic sank.
A month after the sinking, The Washington Post raised the possibility that the tragedy stemmed from the “ancient malice” of a mummified Egyptian priestess. Her priestess cursed her editor for daring to tell her story to the passengers of the Titanic. There are also unconvincing attempts to attribute the high death toll to the German submarine Winston Churchill, sabotaging Catholic shipyards, and the fact that they are electromagnetically sealed to prevent passengers below from escaping. Some people try to blame the deck. Freemasons were accused of orchestrating a cover-up.
Such conspiracy theories are a source of deep and immediate resentment for Haas, and how epic tales of widely documented disasters continue to reach audiences through books, so-called documentaries and now video apps. It is fueled by a long and pent-up disbelief that it can.
“The sad part is that a lot of the people who follow these kinds of cases are teenagers who are horribly reluctant to mine,” he said.
TikTok, which claims to have 150 million users in the US and is especially popular with young people, has been and is a particularly powerful vehicle for misinformation. The Philippines’ violent dictatorship decades ago was recently recast on TikTok as a rosy era of economic growth. An app pawn shop owner last year claimed to own an album of never-before-seen images of the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, but the disturbing photos that have since garnered nearly 52 million views are actually He said it was a “duplicate souvenir” from Shanghai.
Like other social media platforms, TikTok has attempted to quash harmful historical falsehoods. deny the holocaust, working to combat more modern lies about elections, health hacks and other topics. (The company, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, is also battling for its future in the United States amid national security concerns.)
“Our priority is to protect our community, so we remove misinformation that causes serious harm and work with independent fact-checkers to ensure that content on our platform is protected,” said TikTok spokesperson Ben Laathe. It allows us to assess the accuracy of the According to its guidelines, the company prohibits some videos containing conspiracy theories from appearing in its feed, such as videos claiming that a “secret or powerful group” carried out the incident. However, the app does not block these videos completely.
While many of TikTok’s younger users can recognize and make fun of conspiracy theories, this generation has a hard time making sense of the past.8th grade American history proficiency has declined every year since 2014, according to 1 Commonwealth Gauge. another poll When asked if NASA astronauts landed on the moon last year, nearly half of the participants born after 1997 said they didn’t or were unsure.
A recent survey of young Americans who spend more than an hour a day on TikTok found that 17% were “not quite sure the earth is round,” said the Paris-based company, which promotes media literacy and critical activism. According to the Reboot Foundation, a nonprofit that puts the idea.
“Basically, 14-year-olds are probably taught in school that the earth is round, and they probably believe it, but the more often they watch the video, the more they start questioning it,” he said. Says Helen Lee Bouygues, who started the reboot. A foundation that helps fight misinformation. The group recognizes that “the longer young people stay on TikTok, the more they believe what they see,” she said.
Misinformation experts say TikTok’s algorithm and the personalized feeds it creates for its users can make it particularly powerful for spreading conspiracy theories. According to Megan Brown, a senior research engineer at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, the system relies more on engagement than on social connections and followers, such as Twitter and Facebook, to display content to users. It says.
“If someone is spending time on the video, whether that person really believes JP Morgan sank the Titanic, or this is a funny video, someone talks about JP Morgan sinking the Titanic. It doesn’t matter if you believe you are or not,” she says. Mr. Brown said. “As far as TikTok is concerned, this is the same signal, so they endorse that content even more.”
Mr. Morgan, who owned the Titanic for White Star Line, is a prominent figure in the Titanic legend. In a TikTok video, the billionaire withdrew from his planned trip on the Titanic minutes or hours before it set sail, assassinating a formidable opponent on board who opposed the creation of a centralized banking system. Decades-old claims have been repeated that the ship was intended to be used to (Some stories say the creators of TikTok recast the villain as a wealthy Rothschild family or a Catholic Jesuit order.)
Experts say the historical record and common sense do not support such claims. Evidence suggests that Mr. Morgan’s failed date with the Titanic was due to unforeseen circumstances involving European art collections. The businessman also had to ensure that the Titanic would hit the iceberg with devastating force and that his opponents were not among the more than 700 people who survived the crash. be.
Of course, history is not set in stone, and experts often disagree, especially in an era when record-keeping technology was less advanced. Parkes Stevenson, a Navy veteran who visited the wreck many times and advised Prime Minister Cameron in a 2003 documentary about the ship, said many of his colleagues believed the iceberg had damaged the ship’s bottom rather than its sides. Titanic researcher.
But the consensus is this: The Titanic sank in a terrible accident, killing many people. By recognizing the ship’s true fate, Stevenson said, this tragedy has become a valuable tool to understand communications failures, improved safety regulations, marine science, underwater forensics, and hubris and heroism in times of crisis. Said it would be a way.
“On a grand scale, studying history helps us keep moving forward and not repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Stevenson, now executive director of the USS Kidd Veterans Museum. .
The Titanic conspiracy theory may seem relatively harmless, especially in a modern setting where online lies can do real-world harm, such as the attack on the Capitol or the shooter at the pizzeria. . False rumors about a 111-year-old shipwreck fill a gap of sorts for social media companies already struggling to deal with modern-day falsehoods with their content moderators.
Ms Brown said her concerns were long-term erosion of truth and the idea that “people who believe in at least one conspiracy theory tend to believe in at least two or more.”
She said that hooking people with one false narrative makes it easier to trap them with another false narrative. “If you heard this about the Titanic, you wouldn’t believe this another cover-up.”
Without TikTok’s intervention, some users took matters into their own hands.
Rafael Avila, 33, a technology consultant at IBM, known in his spare time on TikTok as “Titanic Dude”, has amassed more than 600,000 followers since 2020 and is a conspiracy theory about a sunken ship. He frequently posts videos that expose the mistakes of
“Those theories have always existed within the Titanic community, but they were kind of on the fringes,” says Avila, who lives in Toronto. obsession I have been with the Titanic since I was a child. TikTok changed that, he says. “When the first few videos were made about the Olympics theory and the Federal Reserve theory, we saw that the algorithms recognized it and people were interested in it and it started to explode.”
Avila joined the app to share her passion for the Titanic story, but quickly took advantage of TikTok’s easy-to-use editing tools, including the ability to “stitch together” or “duet” promotional videos. , added lie-debunking videos to his repertoire. Fake ideas to check facts. Now, whenever a Titanic conspiracy theory video goes viral, his followers often tag him, allowing him to roll up his sleeves and film the facts. Truthful TikTok videos don’t get as many views as conspiracy-filled conspiracy theories, but they can still attract millions of attention, he said.
“My Titanic nerd community expects me to set the record straight, so I took it as my responsibility,” he said. “It’s the internet, so people can say whatever they want.”
