<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/21/once-again-mainstream-media-falls-for-a-fake-tiktok-challenge-creating-yet-another-moral-panic/>
"It seems to happen over and over again, and the mainstream media always makes
it worse. The mainstream media hears about a “TikTok challenge,” reports on it
like crazy, and people freak out that TikTok is destroying the children or some
such.
And every single time, it turns out that the media got the story wrong. Often
ridiculously so. There was the “devious licks” challenge, which at least had
some basis in truth, but which TikTok cracked down on almost immediately. But
when good reporters scratched the surface they found that it was mostly kids
pranking adults, making them think that something bad was going to happen.
But, even worse, there was a big moral panic about the “slap a teacher”
challenge that the media got up in arms about. Only, that one turned out to
have been literally made up by some random adult and then spread by a school
cop on Facebook, claiming that it was an upcoming TikTok challenge. Or the
“school violence challenge,” which was reported all over the media, causing
many schools to shut down entirely for the day, where there is no indication
that it was ever actually a thing. And, if it was, the news was spread much
more widely by TV news anchors freaking out about it without any evidence that
it was real. And, no, the NyQuil chicken challenge was never actually a thing.
And now there’s been another one. At the
Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz
highlights how the
Today Show did a segment about “the boat jump challenge”
in which kids were allegedly jumping from moving boats into the water for clout
on TikTok. Only problem it was all made up."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
