A viral TikTok arguing the Titanic never sank shows how quickly conspiracies spread on the platform

• An 18-year-old TikToker went viral after posting a video claiming the Titanic never sank.
• She deleted it, but the clip continued to spread, showing how misinformation circulates on the app.

When 18-year-old TikTok creator @mia_w22 filmed herself discussing a conspiracy theory that the Titanic never sank, she didn't expect the reaction she received.

"I was a Titanic kid, meaning that I literally knew every single fact about the Titanic," Mia began in her original video, speaking fast and looking directly into her phone's camera. "Like my ass would sit and watch documentaries for hours and hours and hours, but when I heard this theory, everything like, it made sense."

Before she ultimately decided to delete it, Mia garnered over 11 million views on her three-minute video hypothesizing that the historic ship's sinking was actually a planned insurance fraud scheme using a decoy ship called the Olympic — which she correctly identified as being built in 1912 by the British shipping company White Star Line.

"I'm not wrong," she ended her TikTok saying. "Like, I'm not wrong."

Though the content of the video contained multiple factual inaccuracies — regarding the number of portholes on the Titanic, how long the Olympic had been in service by the time the Titanic was built, and why nearby ships did not respond to distress calls — Mia saw it as just another piece of content for her growing true crime and meme-focused social media accounts.

"I made the theory video and posted it thinking all was well and that I was just sharing a fun theory," Mia wrote in a statement to Insider. "Then my boyfriend told me that I was getting hate on Reddit because someone posted my video to the r/titanic subreddit. This is the first instance of me being alerted to my facts in the video being incorrect."

Slowly, the audience engagement on Mia's video turned from curiosity to vitriol. Though she wasn't the first to spread the debunked theory, viewers who came across her video reacted strongly to incorrect details, such as the idea that elites including banker JP Morgan and chocolatier Milton Hershey refused to board the ship because they knew it would go down.

On the r/titanic subreddit, Mia was almost universally panned: one user called the theory a "cancer source," while others called her derogatory names, said they wanted to punch her, and made assumptions that she is autistic.

That vitriol spurred even more engagement and, by the time Mia decided to take down the video — because, she told Insider, that was "what feels right on my conscience" – the clip had taken on a life of its own. Soon, people were taking her clip and reposting it just to debunk it, while others built onto the theory and playfully invited her to hang out.

The life cycle of misinformation

"We tend to think about algorithms as independent machines, but they're serving the purposes that they were built for," Yotam Ophir, a communication professor at the University of Buffalo who studies misinformation, conspiracy theories, and extremism, told Insider. "Most social media apps use algorithms with one main goal inside which is to increase engagement, right? At the end of the day, what Twitter wants, what Facebook wants, what TikTok wants is for us to stay on the platform for as long as possible. So we click on stuff, so we share our data, so we can be exposed to advertisements."

A clip like Mia's, which received a large amount of engagement in a short time, is like gold for a platform like TikTok, which measures how long users watch and hover over videos. As such, the platform has no incentive to fact-check or remove misinformation — like what Mia was sharing — or more extreme rhetoric that amplifies violent or hateful theories, Ophir said.

Misinformation "spreads through the algorithms that push content out to people," Heidi Julien, a professor of information science at the University of Buffalo, who focuses on digital literacy, told Insider. "The impact on people varies. Some people are able to say it's mildly humorous and move on. And unfortunately, there's a proportion of the population that does not know how to discern misinformation from facts, and will share that kind of thing and believe it wholeheartedly, so that impact ranges."

But conspiracy theories, in general, aren't going away, Ophir said. And according to Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist and researcher at the University of Miami who polls the public on their conspiracy theory beliefs, the prevalence of beliefs in conspiracies — like a coordinated attack to kill JFK or that the moon landing was faked — remain relatively stable over time.

"People look for big explanations for big events," Ophir told Insider, giving the example of Kennedy's assassination as a prominent conspiracy theory, even decades after his death. "Same with 9/11. And same with the Titanic, right? It's a very big event and those big events often invite people to kind of almost make an assumption that if something so big happened, it must have a big explanation behind it: Somebody planned it or maybe the whole thing is just a scheme, it never happened, a hoax, and so on."

The theories get recirculated when people like Mia share them with new audiences and the misinformation goes viral, branching off into impossible-to-track threads and catching an untold number of eyes. As such, it's difficult to track a single origin for theories like a falsified Titanic sinking, but their themes remain largely the same.

"Often it's the same theory we've been hearing for a long time, with just a different noun," Uscinski told Insider. "So for example, during COVID, it was the COVID vaccine is going to do something bad to you. But in 2019, it was the MMR vaccine, or it was some other vaccine."

Uscinski said during the height of COVID-19 fears, Bill Gates became the target of theories that he was "going to take over the world and do terrible things," but before that, "it was George Soros, and the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds, and the Kennedys, and the Koch brothers."

"So it's the same stuff rehashed in not always the most creative ways, over and over again," Uscinski told Insider. "But they're all evincing sort of the same thing: Somebody's up to no good and there is a hidden reality beneath what we've been told."

The uncertain future of TikTok

Because of the connections to the Chinese government — including allegations the company's leadership planned to use location data gathered from the app for surveillance of two American citizens – Ophir said people fear TikTok's algorithms will be used, not only to increase the company's financial gains, but also to promote specific political agendas and arguments.

ByteDance, the Bejing-based parent company of TikTok, did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

"We know from the past that TikTok was censoring information related to China and Chinese politics," Ophir told Insider. "So it can be things related to Hong Kong or Taiwan, or things related to LGBTQ rights. I don't think that the algorithm per se is the kind of potential problem here, but the way the app might be designed by the Chinese government to promote specific propaganda and silence views that don't fit well with the Chinese government."

Members of Congress have continued to push for a nationwide ban of the app, while it has been banned from some government devices and college campuses over its data privacy and misinformation concerns. In 2021, the Biden administration promised a security review of foreign-owned apps. It has yet to publish results.

While TikTok's future remains unclear, Mia said in her most recent video that she was "putting the Titanic era" behind her to focus on true crime content.

"The Titanic era is long gone," Mia says in the clip, promising she'll continue making videos. But, to avoid the same reaction as the Titanic video, she added, "I might start linking my sources to the videos."