His story, as flamboyant as it is tragic, has inspired Hollywood and literature, inspires dreams or moves millions of spectators and readers around the world. But more than a century after its sinking, the Titanic also generates its flood of legends, including the one which affirms that the mythical ocean liner… did not sink.
The tragic expedition followed this week by the media from all over the world of the submersible and its occupants who went to visit the wreck of the Titanic has brought to light the most crazy theories circulating on the liner.
Of all these stories, the one questioning the sinking of the ship on April 12, 1912 in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, and the disappearance with it of hundreds of its passengers, is undoubtedly the most disturbing.
“The Titanic never really sank,” says a video on the TikTok platform titled “The Deep Dive” and viewed more than four million times.
“Everyone knows the story of this unstoppable ship that sank after hitting an iceberg, but that may not be the case,” this clip claims.
It opens with a tragic portrait of the Titanic, its reputedly unsinkable hull battered by the waves, and a male voice that affirms: the Titanic has been exchanged with its twin brother, the Olympic.
The video alludes to the oft-circulated theory that the company that built Britain’s liner actually deliberately sank the Olympic, another ship in its fleet, in an incredible insurance fraud.
TikTok’s algorithm and its recommendation system, which makes it possible to create streams for each user according to their interests, make it a powerful platform for spreading conspiracy theories, explain experts.
“It makes it easier to spread this type of content,” Megan Brown, a researcher at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, told AFP.
“The other factor that makes it easier for historical-type conspiracy theories to spread, compared to other fake news, is that it’s usually unmoderated content,” says the researcher.
Because if the platform says to remove content that may cause “significant harm” to individuals or society (such as violence or harassment), other seemingly harmless, but full of errors, can continue to circulate.
According to researchers, this policy reveals a major dilemma facing social networks: How to deal with the explosion of misinformation without giving users the impression of restricting their freedom of expression?
It is into this breach that conspiracy theorists of all kinds rush… and their theories, however, repeatedly invalidated, such as “The Earth is flat” or “The first step of man on the Moon in 1969 was a hoax” .
To which are added the “experts” of the Titanic on TikTok, whose theories focus on the tragic maiden crossing of the ship.
Very innocuous theories compared to other much more serious ones circulating on the net, but which should nevertheless be demystified, say historians.
They fear that conspiracy theories will affect the way a whole generation of young people, whose platforms like TikTok are often the only source of information, will know the story of the Titanic.
“The sad thing is that many of those who follow these things are teenagers,” laments Charles A. Haas, founder of the Titanic International Society, which is dedicated to researching the liner.
“They are totally unwilling to do (real) research,” he said in the columns of The New York Times.
TikTok influencers are now taking over the press as a “source of information” for young people, according to a June report by the Britain-based Reuters Institute.
According to this report, 55% of TikTok and Snapchat users and 52% of Instagram users get their news from “personalities”, compared to 33% to 42% who prefer mainstream media and journalists, on these same platforms. .
That’s how millions of young users took to TikTok this week for information about the five people aboard the submersible who went missing in the North Atlantic on their way to visit the wreck of the Titanic.
The five people died after the small scientific tourism submarine imploded, the US Coast Guard said Thursday.
“What if it was all a cover-up?” a young user on TikTok immediately asked, referring to the media coverage of the case. “What if there’s something behind all of this that we don’t see?” he added.
His video has already been viewed more than 4.2 million times…
23/06/2023 09:26:36 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP