By: Brayden Yin

Over the past couple of weeks, misinformation about the famous doomed ship has been spreading through the short-form video app TikTok. Though the facts, such as the liner colliding with an iceberg, and bad radio communication, on TikTok, doubt about whether the vessel ever sank is rampant.

One such example is a 32-second video that employs unproven theories and unreliable evidence. It depicts an image of the stern of the Titanic struggling to stay above the sea, while a man in a hoodie and a backwards baseball hat makes the argument that the Titanic never sank. He cites the disproven “swap theory”, saying that the remains of the ship at the bottom of the ocean were actually the ruins of the Titanic’s sister ship, which was an older model called the Olympic, as an attempt at insurance fraud.

Since the Titanic sank, skepticism of its very truth has persisted. One example of this is from the 1997 film Titanic, where it has long been debated whether Jack and Rose, the two main characters, could have survived on a door, floating in the freezing ocean of the Atlantic. Various tests have shown that two people could have survived until help later came.

Charles A. Haas is the founder of the Titanic International Society and has spent 60 years researching the sunken ship. Haas says that “it becomes kind of deflating to see a lot of this junk coming out,” especially after having written five books about the Titanic and dived to the wreck site twice. He has debunked many conspiracy theories, and he feels “like one of the very few voices crying out against the sound of a hurricane.” Many scholars like Haas are annoyed by this skepticism.

Misinformation is rampant in the modern world, and there is no better example than the manipulation of facts on TikTok.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/business/titanic-tiktok-misinformation.html