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The Titanic truthers of TikTok

On the short-form video app, long-established facts about the 1912 disaster at sea are being newly litigated as musty rumours merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content

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.

Like other social media platforms, TikTok has tried to tamp down some harmful historical falsehoods, such as efforts to deny the Holocaust, while working to combat more modern lies about elections, health hacks and other topics. The company, which is owned by a Chinese internet company, ByteDance, has also been fighting for its future in the United States amid national security concerns.

“Our priority is to protect our community, which is why we remove misinformation that will cause significant harm and work with independent fact checkers to help assess the accuracy of content on our platform,” said Ben Rathe, a spokesperson for TikTok. According to its guidelines, the company prevents some videos with conspiracy theories from showing up in feeds, like those claiming that “covert or powerful groups” carried out events. But the app doesn’t block these videos altogether.

While many of the young users on TikTok can recognise and poke fun at conspiracy theories, the generation also struggles with understanding the past. Proficiency in U.S. history among eighth graders has declined every year since 2014, according to one federal gauge. A poll last year asked whether Nasa astronauts had landed on the moon; nearly half of the participants who were born after 1997 said the astronauts had not or that they were unsure.

Misinformation experts say TikTok’s algorithm and the personalized feeds it creates for users can make it particularly powerful for spreading conspiracy theories. To show content to users, the system relies less on social connections and followers, like on Twitter and Facebook, and more on engagement, said Megan Brown, a senior research engineer at New York University’s Centre for Social Media and Politics.

“If someone is spending time on a video, it doesn’t matter if they really believe J.P. Morgan sank the Titanic, or if they believe, hey, this is a funny video, someone is talking about J.P. Morgan sinking the Titanic,” Brown said. “This is the same signal as far as TikTok is concerned, so they recommend more of that content.”

Morgan, whose White Star Line owned the Titanic, figures prominently in Titanic lore. TikTok videos repeat decades-old claims that the millionaire backed out of a planned trip on the Titanic minutes or hours before it set sail because he intended to use the ship to assassinate powerful enemies onboard who opposed his efforts to create a centralized banking system. (In some tellings, TikTok creators have recast the villains as the wealthy Rothschild family or even the Catholic order of the Jesuits.)

Experts point out that the historical record and common sense do not support such assertions. Evidence suggests that Morgan failed to make his date with the Titanic because he was dealing with an unexpected situation involving his European art collection. The businessman would also have had to ensure that the Titanic would strike an iceberg with catastrophic force, and that his opponents were not among the more than 700 people who survived the crash.

Titanic conspiracy theories may seem relatively harmless, especially in a modern environment where online lies have enabled real-world harm, such as an attack on the Capitol or a gunman in a pizzeria. Untrue rumours about a 111-year-old shipwreck fall into something of a gap for social media companies, which are already struggling to address contemporary falsehoods with content moderators.

Brown said the concern is a longer-term erosion of the truth and the idea that “people who believe in at least one conspiracy theory tend to believe in at least more than one.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.