The Titanic truthers of TikTok

The finer details of what happened to the RMS Titanic differ depending on who is telling the story.

The iceberg that collided with the luxury liner was spotted at 11:40pm, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or 11:35pm, which is what an exhibition about the ship in New York claims. The Royal Museums Greenwich in Britain says the doomed vessel cost 1,503 people their lives, while the Smithsonian in the United States notes that 1,522 passengers and crew members died.

Historians have attributed the variance to factors like imperfect ticketing lists and rushed head counts transmitted using weak signals. The broad strokes, however, are not in question. All credible experts agree that on April 15, 1912, less than a week into its maiden voyage, the Titanic ended up at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.

More than a century later, on TikTok, a far different version has been circulating. In a post that garnered more than 11 million views before it was removed this year, one user wrote: “the titanic never sank!!!”

On the short-form video app, long-established facts about the crash are being newly litigated as musty rumours merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content — a demonstration of TikTok’s potent ability to seed historical revisionism about even the most deeply studied cases.

One 32-second post opens with a dramatic black-and-white drawing of the Titanic, its stern straining above waves studded with people, set to a spooky synthesizer tune. A man in a hoodie and a backward baseball cap, crudely green-screened into the frame, makes a familiar argument (accompanied by an emoji of a screaming face): “The Titanic NEVER actually sank.” Looking into the camera, he repeats the so-called and exhaustively disproved “swap” theory — that the ruins on the seabed belong to the Titanic’s older and decrepit sister ship, the Olympic, scuttled in an attempt at insurance fraud.

Another video presents a conspiracy theory that the wreck was a “hit job” ordered by financier J.P. Morgan — whose real name was John Pierpont Sr. — to eliminate opponents of the Federal Reserve.

Titanic scepticism has irritated scholars of the ship since it sank. Then in December came the 25th anniversary of the 1997 film “Titanic,” the costly and heartthrob-minting epic that laid a swooning romance over a fictionalized depiction of the disaster.

The celebration included a rerelease of the film in theatres just before Valentine’s Day. There was also a flurry of news reports about James Cameron, the director, working with scientists and stuntpeople to resolve a persistent debate about a pivotal scene in the movie, which centred on how many star-crossed lovers could survive on a door floating in freezing ocean water. (Tests showed that two could have, in fact, managed.)

Cameron’s experiments seemed to add fuel to a raft of TikTok conspiracy theories about the actual Titanic — many of them patched together from a grab bag of suppositions and misinterpreted evidence and posted in quippy online instalments.

“It becomes kind of deflating to see a lot of this junk coming out,” said Charles A. Haas, a founder of the Titanic International Society who has spent six decades studying the ill-fated vessel. He cowrote five books on the topic, dived down to the wreck site twice, and debunked more conspiracy theories than he cares to count.

“I feel like one of the very few voices crying out against the sound of a hurricane,” he said.

The Titanic International Society, one of several historical organizations worldwide dedicated to Titanic study, has Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts but no presence on TikTok. Haas attributed the decision in part to the fear that TikTok’s reputation as “kind of a wild and woolly place” would taint any serious research shared on the platform.

“The sad part is that many of the people following this sort of thing are teenagers, and they are woefully unwilling to do digging,” he said.

TikTok, which purports to have 150 million American users and is particularly popular with youths, has become an especially powerful vector for misinformation, past and present. A period of violent dictatorship in the Philippines decades ago was recently recast on TikTok as a rosy time of economic growth. A pawnshop owner on the app claimed last year to have an album of previously unseen images of the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, but later said the disturbing photos, which drew nearly 52 million views, were actually “reproduction souvenirs” from Shanghai.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.