No, there is not a deadly TikTok ‘boat jumping challenge.’ Why do fake TikTok trends spread?
Prior to the holiday weekend on July 3, local news outlets in Alabama were reporting that “a deadly trend” was “killing people of all ages.” Cap. Jim Dennis with the Childersburg Rescue Squad told outlets: “We have had four drownings that were easily avoidable. They were doing a TikTok challenge.”
The “challenge,” according to Dennis, involved people jumping off moving boats at high speeds. Doing this can result in paralysis or death.
Other publications took the quote and ran with it. ABC7 published the headline “Trending TikTok boat jumping challenge kills at least 4 in Alabama” on July 8. Two days later, Today ran a segment about it that has since been taken down. People magazine, on July 11, left an editor’s note on its coverage of the “trend,” reading, “This story has been updated to reflect a substantive update made by authorities after publication.”
On July 10, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) tweeted that the information was “incorrect.” It clarified in a follow-up tweet that the ALEA’s Marine Patrol Division did not have any records of boating or marine-related fatalities in Alabama “that can be directly linked to TikTok or a trend on TikTok.”
On the same day as the ALEA’s tweets, Dennis told another local news outlet in Alabama that his original comments were “blown way out of proportion.” But he reiterated that he thought there was a TikTok challenge, but he couldn’t prove it caused some of the drownings.
“There is a TikTok challenge, but I do know jumping off of a moving boat is nothing new,” he said. “As far as TikTok, there’s not a challenge on there that’s any good.”
Dennis’s full interview has been uploaded in its entirety to YouTube. In it, Dennis also says the unsubstantiated boat jumping challenge is “just like with TikTok issuing the Tide Pod challenge.” The Tide Pod challenge, which data revealed wasn’t a public health crisis, according to statistics from the American Association of Poison Control Centers, is credited as having started from a 2015 Onion headline and started to pick up steam on YouTube to become a meme in 2017. TikTok launched in the U.S. in 2018.
Ben Rathe, a spokesperson for TikTok, told the Associated Press that “boat jumping” has never trended on the platform and that TikTok does not comment on things that are “not part (of the platform) / are not trending on the platform.”
The hashtag #boatjumpchallenge does have over 1 million views on TikTok but is not exclusively of people jumping off moving boats. One video from 2019 with the hashtag shows a creator in his garage doing a box jump on top of his boat. Another video from 2021 is of a TikTok user and his boss both jumping off an anchored boat near Indonesia. A lot of videos with the hashtag are recapping the recent news stories about the “deadly trend.”
There’s a similar issue with the hashtag #boatjumping, which has over 15 million views, but doesn’t show countless videos of people participating in a challenge, as most legitimate TikTok trends do.
The story and media reactions feel similar to the NyQuil chicken discussion that was happening throughout 2022. Aside from the fact that NyQuil chicken is a rebrand of “sleepy chicken,” a fake recipe that was intended to troll users on 4chan in 2017, it seemed as though nobody was actually cooking chicken in NyQuil.
TechCrunch reported at the time: “If you search phrases like ‘sleepy chicken recipe’ on TikTok, almost every video is a duet or a stitch-style expression of outrage. Users will share a clip of the same video of one person cooking chicken in NyQuil, then add a clip of themselves reacting to how absolutely absurd it is.”
In September 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning for parents, writing, “One social media trend relying on peer pressure is online video clips of people misusing nonprescription medications and encouraging viewers to do so too.” The FDA did not link to any examples.
The year prior, in 2021, an alleged “slap your teacher” challenge was being covered by outlets as going viral and encouraging students to slap their teachers. Snopes, a fact-checking resource, published an article about it at the time and concluded: “Little evidence exists that ‘slap a teacher’ is an actual ‘challenge’ on TikTok.”
Some social media users have taken note of how these fake trends get picked up by outlets and have tried to poke fun at them by taking them to a new level. In February 2022, a Twitter user posted a Photoshopped article headline claiming Kanye West didn’t like when Julia Fox “went goblin mode.” So many publications ran with the tweet that Fox had to go on Instagram Stories and say, “Just for the record, I have never used the term ‘goblin mode.'”
it’s incredibly easy to create fake news it’s actually ridiculous lol pic.twitter.com/grrsFCVq2y
— pudding person (@JUNlPER) February 16, 2022
A lot of the fake trends like “goblin mode,” “hellmaxxing” and “skeleton brunch” are ways for users to parody the fearmongering that surrounds TikTok coverage. Taylor Lorenz argued in the Washington Post that the “boat jumping challenge” coverage was “the latest hoax aimed at scaring adults about teen technology use.”
But arguably a big issue behind the spread of fake trends has to do with media literacy — for both older and younger generations and even journalists.
“When it comes to viral trends, sometimes journalists get sucked in,” Mike Cana, the director of journalism strategies at the Scripps Howard Foundation, wrote in an article on Medium. “Crazy stories come our way, and sometimes journalists don’t question the story or question officials or sources enough.”
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