By 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 fellow Titanic passengers. Others have tried, unconvincingly, to pin the high death toll on Winston Churchill, a German submarine, sabotage-minded Catholic shipbuilders or decks that could be electromagnetically sealed to prevent passengers below from escaping. The Freemasons were accused of orchestrating a cover-up.
Such conspiracy theories are a fount of deep and familiar exasperation for Mr. Haas, fueled by years of weary disbelief that tall tales about an extensively documented disaster can continue to find audiences through books, so-called documentaries and now, a video app.
“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 claims 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 that 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 the 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 spokesman for TikTok. According to its guidelines, the company prevents some videos with conspiracy theories from showing up in feeds, like those that claim “covert or powerful groups” carried out events. But the app doesn’t block these videos altogether.
