TikTok enters its moral panic era: Why does everyone keep falling for hoax challenges and fake trends?

When the Food & Drug Administration put out a memo last month warning readers not to marinate chicken in NyQuil cold and flu medicine, it had the opposite effect as intended — instead of keeping people away, it likely led to thousands of new searches for the neon poultry. Soon, an essentially non-existent trend that had its roots in a 4chan meme was all over news headlines and social media platforms. The FDA’s warning about cooking chicken in NyQuil is not the first time authorities or media organizations have given outsized attention to a barely-there online trend.

Over the last few years, a wave of fake and flimsy trends have turned into fodder for moral panics: “Slap a Teacher,” the Momo hoax , the “Skeleton Brunch” meme and more have become objects of concern for authorities and parents. Panics over social media trends have become so common that they have begun to inspire their own parodies. Sebastian Durfee, a 23-year-old TikToker and actor, aimed to prove that any scary-seeming trend could go viral when earlier this month he led a campaign to make a fictional “porcelain challenge” go viral.

Durfee made a TikTok last weekend telling his followers about an idea — a fake challenge where people would snort blended-up porcelain — and urged them to “troll the boomers” by making videos warning about the craze, pretending it was real. His video amassed hundreds of thousands of views and clips about the trend spread online, eventually leading TikTok to ban his account. Durfee told Insider he wanted to see if it was possible to spawn an internet rumor if it was something that could be easily disproved “with about two seconds of work just by searching” — even his original video made it clear the challenge was made-up.

He felt the saga and the resulting ban proved him right. “As long as it was exciting and scary, people would still share it as if it was real,” Durfee said. While many dangerous online trends have legitimately gone viral, there are also numerous instances where authorities and media outlets have warned about trends that were barely popular or never existed in the first place.

A major example was the so-called “Slap a Teacher” TikTok challenge in late 2021, which gained traction as a Facebook rumor and led to warnings across states, school districts, and police departments. Researchers tracked its origins back to a rumor at a single California high school, which then spread through Facebook groups popular with educators. Despite TikTok saying it could not find any evidence of the purported craze taking over the app and numerous outlets debunking it as a fake fad, other organizations and news outlets kept covering it as a dangerous phenomenon on the platform.

The more recent NyQuil chicken challenge — sometimes also called making “sleepy chicken” — began as a joke on 4chan and Twitter in 2017, and has swirled around the internet since then. A couple of videos of people doing the trend and pouring the blue liquid all over chicken went viral on TikTok and YouTube in early 2022, even spawning an offshoot video where someone made NyQuil pasta, according to Mic . Cooking chicken in boiling cough and cold medicine is certainly dangerous, as the FDA’s warning on September 15 says.

But there has been no widespread NyQuil chicken trend on social media, and the government statement has only spotlighted the challenge in a much bigger way. There have not yet been any reports of deaths, injuries, or hospitalizations resulting from the so-called trend. Yotam Ophir, a professor of communication at the University of Buffalo, compared the amplification effect of the FDA’s warning to media organizations giving extensive coverage to baseless conspiracy theories like QAnon, helping boost a fringe idea into a national concern.

“The trend was coming and going in relatively small waves on TikTok for months if not more, but didn’t attract the attention of the masses,” Ophir said of NyQuil chicken. “What might have been a niche online curiosity is now a national buzzing story. ” Moral panics surrounding new technology have existed for generations, Ophir told Insider.

Fear over new forms of media and communication affecting youth have risen around the introduction of telephones, new music genres and comic books. “This almost mystic belief in the omnipotent power of media and technology often leads to wrong conclusions and hasty decision-making in an attempt to reduce exaggerated concerns,” Ophir said. The latest scapegoat for moral panic concern among adults is TikTok, where new trends rise every week and the fast-paced, personalized algorithm is opaque and scarily accurate.

There have been many examples of broadly social media-based challenges that the government and outlets have blamed on TikTok, when in reality they had little to no presence on the platform. One instance was the “Benadryl Challenge,” a trend that the FDA warned about where people would down a large amount of the antihistamine to try to feel hallucinogenic effects. The warning named TikTok as the hub for the trend’s videos, but an Insider investigation into the purported fad found no videos on TikTok encouraging people to partake.

Insider also reported that the concept of purposefully ingesting excess benadryl had existed online for years — even popping up in one video by influencer Tana Mongeau. TikTok said the content was not actively trending on the platform, although a source said some videos had been taken down earlier in the year. There was also the deadly “Blackout Challenge,” which involves people choking themselves and has often been described as a TikTok challenge.

But choking games have existed in multiple forms both online and off long before TikTok was created. Back in 2008, the CDC released a study identifying the “Choking Game” (which it says has also variously been called names like the “blackout game” and the “pass-out game”) as the cause of 82 probable youth deaths between 1995 and 2007. Durfee, who said he initially wanted to make the fake porcelain challenge after seeing so many media outlets push stories about bogus trends, argued that public safety concerns often take precedence over careful fact-checking, causing these rumors to morph into mass panics.

“There’s such a clear case in the culture of act first, ask questions later, because the safety of our children is the most important thing,” Durfee said. “People will always latch on to what they feel is the morally justified solution of, ‘Whether or not this is true, we still need to be careful about it. ‘” And while Durfee’s fanbase was already full of people who enjoy comedy and would be eager to participate in a parody, he said, TikTok’s algorithm helped push the video on a larger audience.

The speed of online trend cycles and platform algorithms that emphasize promoting engagement often means that hoaxes and disinformation can get mass attention before they’re debunked. Durfee described the situation as a “self-perpetuating cycle” where older generations feel justified in worrying about new trends because of the memory of prior ones. In comments on his porcelain challenge video, he noticed people referencing previous hoaxes such as NyQuil chicken and the snort a condom challenge even though both had essentially been hoaxes.

“It gets more and more impassioned despite the fact that all of the evidence that they’re citing was falsified,” Durfee said. .