This week (and every week) people are wrong about dangerous TikTok challenges. This tragic story of a teenager in North Carolina burning himself with an aerosol can flamethrower is all over the media, with news outlets from Chicago to India reporting that Mason Dark was engaged in a TikTok challenge when he lit himself on fire.
According to the child’s mother, Mason and his friends were playing with a can of spray paint and a lighter on Sunday. There was an explosion, and the boy was burned badly enough to require hospitalization.
The mother told WRAL.com, “It is challenges on TikTok…I guess kids have been doing this a long time.” But the supposed challenge doesn’t seem to exist.
Fake challenges, irresponsible media, and moral panic
I’m not faulting an injured child’s mom for not understanding the intricacies of online culture—her son could very well have been filming a video he intended to put on TikTok—but the many news organization reporting a non-existent trend as a fact are feeding into a long-running moral panic.
The name “Flamethrower Challenge” has been attached to the supposed trend, but that seems to be an invention of media outlets. Despite news reports, there is no viral flamethrower trend. There is no hashtag. There is no online community. I can find only a handful of videos anywhere of people making homemade flamethrowers, all of which are unrelated and none of which are recent. As a TikTok spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider: “This is not a ‘challenge’ on our platform.”
Nor is the Flamethrower Challenge upset an isolated incident. A search of Google News for the phrase “TikTok challenge danger” returns nearly 10,000 recent news articles including warnings about supposedly 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 were wildly misrepresented in the media.
Another, the Benadryl Challenge, does seem to have recently resulted in a child’s death, though it’s unclear how direct a role TikTok played in the tragedy, given that the social media company noted that it has blocked searches on the topic for years and has never noted the topic actually trending. On the other hand, rumors that allergy meds will get you high have circulated online and offline for years.
It’s understandable that parents and authorities are concerned about Tiktok’s influence on children. A Pew Survey from 2021 found that two-thirds of U.S. teenagers use the app, spending an average of 90 minutes a day on it. No one actually knows what effect (if any) TikTok’s constant barrage of dance videos and memes will have on developing minds. Plus: children have a well deserved reputation for doing very stupid things for very stupid reasons.
But even if police spokespeople and parents are legitimately mistaken and acting out of a desire to protect their children and community, these warnings say more about their fears and fantasies than they do about what’s actually happening online. Well-meaning or not, it’s lazy. And these authority figures are creating and spreading a constant smokescreen of misinformation and fabulism that makes it harder to understand and recognize actual danger by burying it under a pile of bullshit too deep for most people to dig through.
Enter the U.S. government
It’s one thing for local news organization and sheriffs to spread misinformation, but the federal government should know better. In September of 2022, the FDA issued a warning about about “NyQuil chicken,” describing a particularly ridiculous online joke about cooking chicken in cold medicine as a “recent social media video challenge,” even though no one was actually making it. The warning was picked up by the press, and a gross-out picture posted on 4chan nearly a decade earlier became a big news story. As a result of the FDA’s report, searches for the term “NyQuil chicken” spiked, and I’d bet at least one person tried it who wouldn’t have heard of it otherwise.
I can’t figure out why the FDA would, out of nowhere, issue this warning. They’re speaking from a position of national authority; shouldn’t they have fact-checkers? The tinfoil hat part of my brain thinks it’s a small part of a labyrinthian government conspiracy too complex to understand without a whiteboard and some meth. The rest of my brain thinks someone in the FDA’s aunt forwarded a hoax email and everyone at the office freaked out. (Something similar recently happened in tech, when a government agency sort of randomly decided to warn people about the not-actually-extant threat of “juice jacking.”)
It’s always about money
While online moral panics seem to mostly stem from a collective cultural uneasiness about technology, that’s not the only thing that can drive them. In at least one case, a moral firestorm was fanned by a corporation trying to hurt a competitor. In March of 2022, the Washington Post reported that Targeted Victory, a marketing firm employed by Facebook’s parent company Meta, intentionally helped spread misinformation to smear Facebook’s main competitor TikTok.
In the previous year, news reports across the country reported on a supposed trend called the “slap a teacher challenge” in which students were planning to hit their teacher on a specific day. Despite being totally fake, this challenge got more traction than most, including coverage in the national press, warnings from teachers’ unions, and at least one stern letter to TikTok from a state attorney general. Seeing an opportunity, Targeted Victory fanned the flames by helping to plant negative op-eds linking TikTok to “slap a teacher” and other dubious trends, and spreading and amplifying the message that TikTok is dangerous while Facebook is actually awesome, which is demonstrably false.
Misinformation is everywhere. We’re all out here skimming headlines and not reading articles, letting our biases determine our truths, and being intentionally misled by shady actors and algorithms every day. What People Are Getting Wrong This Week seeks to highlight and correct common misconceptions, mistakes, and the occasional opinion I just don’t like. If you spot someone being wrong on the internet, let me know.