The Titanic Truthers of TikTok
On the short-form video app, long-established facts about the 1912 disaster at sea are being newly litigated as musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content.
One 32-second post opens with a dramatic black-and-white drawing of the Titanic, its stern straining above waves studded with people, set to a spooky synthesizer tune. A man in a hoodie and a backward baseball cap, crudely green-screened into the frame, makes a familiar argument (accompanied by an emoji of a screaming face): “The Titanic NEVER actually sank.” Looking into the camera, he repeats the so-called and exhaustively disproved “swap” theory — that the ruins on the seabed belong to the Titanic’s older and decrepit sister ship, the Olympic, scuttled in an attempt at insurance fraud.
Another video presents a conspiracy theory that the wreck was a “hit job” ordered by the financier J.P. Morgan — whose real name was John Pierpont Sr. — to eliminate opponents of the Federal Reserve.
“It becomes kind of deflating to see a lot of this junk coming out,” said Charles A. Haas, a founder of the Titanic International Society who has spent six decades studying the ill-fated vessel. He co-wrote five books on the topic, dived down to the wreck site twice and debunked more conspiracy theories than he cares to count. “I feel like one of the very few voices crying out against the sound of a hurricane.”
TikTok is just the latest recycling bin for false narratives about the Titanic, which began circulating almost as soon as the ship had sunk.
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.
Mr. Morgan, whose White Star Line owned the Titanic, figures prominently in Titanic lore. TikTok videos repeat decades-old claims that the millionaire backed out of a planned trip on the Titanic minutes or hours before it set sail because he intended to use the ship to assassinate powerful enemies onboard who opposed his efforts to create a centralized banking system. (In some tellings, TikTok creators have recast the villains as the wealthy Rothschild family or even the Catholic order of the Jesuits.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/busin...ation.html
On the short-form video app, long-established facts about the 1912 disaster at sea are being newly litigated as musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content.
One 32-second post opens with a dramatic black-and-white drawing of the Titanic, its stern straining above waves studded with people, set to a spooky synthesizer tune. A man in a hoodie and a backward baseball cap, crudely green-screened into the frame, makes a familiar argument (accompanied by an emoji of a screaming face): “The Titanic NEVER actually sank.” Looking into the camera, he repeats the so-called and exhaustively disproved “swap” theory — that the ruins on the seabed belong to the Titanic’s older and decrepit sister ship, the Olympic, scuttled in an attempt at insurance fraud.
Another video presents a conspiracy theory that the wreck was a “hit job” ordered by the financier J.P. Morgan — whose real name was John Pierpont Sr. — to eliminate opponents of the Federal Reserve.
“It becomes kind of deflating to see a lot of this junk coming out,” said Charles A. Haas, a founder of the Titanic International Society who has spent six decades studying the ill-fated vessel. He co-wrote five books on the topic, dived down to the wreck site twice and debunked more conspiracy theories than he cares to count. “I feel like one of the very few voices crying out against the sound of a hurricane.”
TikTok is just the latest recycling bin for false narratives about the Titanic, which began circulating almost as soon as the ship had sunk.
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.
Mr. Morgan, whose White Star Line owned the Titanic, figures prominently in Titanic lore. TikTok videos repeat decades-old claims that the millionaire backed out of a planned trip on the Titanic minutes or hours before it set sail because he intended to use the ship to assassinate powerful enemies onboard who opposed his efforts to create a centralized banking system. (In some tellings, TikTok creators have recast the villains as the wealthy Rothschild family or even the Catholic order of the Jesuits.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/busin...ation.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"