A month after the wreck, The Washington Post raised the possibility that the tragedy stemmed from the “ancient malice” of a mummified Egyptian priestess, who cursed an editor after he dared to tell her story to other Titanic passengers. Others have tried, inconclusively, to attribute the high death toll to Winston Churchill, a German submariner, sabotage-oriented Catholic shipbuilders, or decks that can be electromagnetically sealed to prevent passengers from escaping below. The Freemasons were accused of orchestrating a cover-up.
Such conspiracy theories are a source of deep and familiar annoyance to Mr. Haas, fueled by years of weary disbelief that tall tales of a well-documented disaster can continue to find audiences through books, so-called documentaries and now a video app.
“The sad thing is that a lot of the people who follow this stuff are teenagers and are woefully unwilling to dig,” he said.
TikTok, which claims to have 150 million US users and is especially popular with young people, has become a particularly powerful vector for misinformation, both 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 pawn shop owner on the app last year claimed to have an album of previously unseen images of the 1937 Nanjing rape, but later said the disturbing photos, which had nearly 52 million views, were actually “reproduction souvenirs” from Shanghai.
Like other social media platforms, TikTok has tried to squash some damaging historical falsehoods, such as attempts to deny the Holocaust, while working to combat more modern lies about elections, health hacks, and other topics. (The company, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, is also fighting for its future in the United States over national security concerns.)
“Our priority is to protect our community, so we remove misinformation that can cause significant harm and work with independent fact-checkers to assess the accuracy of content on our platform,” said Ben Rathe, a TikTok spokesperson. Under its guidelines, the company prevents some conspiracy theory videos from appearing in feeds, such as those claiming that “secret or powerful groups” have carried out events. But the app does not completely block these videos.
