No TikTok videos or trends credibly threatening shootings at U.S. schools on Friday have been found on the platform.
Despite unsourced warnings from Bay Area law enforcement and school districts, and school closures vaguely citing a "challenge" or "trend" encouraging violence, internet researchers and TikTok itself said Friday the threats didn't exist.
TikTok tweeted it had found no posts that promoted "violence at schools." Local police departments, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security also found "no credible threat" of violence on the platform.
Emily Dreyfuss, Senior Fellow at Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, told KCBS Radio in an interview on Friday she found "absolutely nothing" to corroborate that violent threats had been posted on the platform.
Dreyfuss is one of three authors of "Drafted into the Meme Wars," a 2022 book examining the real-world violence that spawned from online battles in far-right forums. In those spaces, she found no evidence anyone had planned shootings for Friday, or hoaxes intended to scare people.
"I found people on those terrifying forums saying, 'Does anyone know what the media is talking about? I don't know about this. Is this real? Is this happening?' " Dreyfuss told KCBS Radio on Friday.
"And to me, that's a real moment where we in the media need to take stock of the role we play here because there is absolutely, as far as I can tell, nothing to corroborate a headline that says this is a TikTok trend," she added.
Dreyfuss said the spread of the supposed threats, without corroboration of its origins from schools, law enforcement and media sources, was a consequence of "our networked information age" in which school shootings are all too common.
Although many schools across the country have only held in-person classes for part of the year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Everytown for Gun Safety tracked more "incidents of gunfire on school grounds" in 2021 (149) than in 2019 (130).
Law enforcement and schools have been on high alert. Two Bay Area police departments arrested suspects who allegedly threatened gun violence just this month.
School and police officials pay particular attention to TikTok because of its ubiquity among teenagers. Dreyfuss argued the platform has replaced Snapchat as "shorthand for any bad things that the teens are doing, or that we're worried that they're doing," especially because this isn't the first supposed "trend" with dubious origins to prompt official warnings.
But TikTok's nature can also enable misinformation's easy spread. Josephine Lukito, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas School of Journalism and Media, told KCBS Radio in an interview that the app emphasizes video and primarily shows users content through its algorithm, making an original source of misinformation difficult to pin down.
"When you hear that kids are doing a challenge, a lot of times teens or young adults might not actually be doing that challenge," she said. " … (In) mass communications theory, it's called the hypodermic needle. You think that somebody's going to consume this content, and be totally affected by it and change all of their behaviors as a result of consuming some sort of media content."
"And I think we tend to have that sort of panic when we think young teens are being exposed to these threat challenges, or Tide Pod challenges," she added, "when in reality, a lot of it is satire, or things that even teens realize are not to be taken seriously."
Both Lukito and Dreyfuss said identifying online misinformation is imperative for everyone, not just TikTok users.
Lukito told KCBS Radio she often directs people to Poynter for media literacy and fact-checking resources, as well as the University of Texas Center for Media Engagement and the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub as academic sources.
Dreyfuss, meanwhile, is Senior Editor of the "Media Manipulation Casebook," which tracks the spread of misinformation through researched case studies. She advised pausing before sharing information if unsure of its origin, no matter how alarming it could be.
"Just take a beat," Dreyfuss said. "Think about it, read the headline again. See if you know if there's enough information there to really trust it, and ask yourself whether it's essential for you to share it. Because a lot of these scares that really stress people out and have real-world consequences only happen because so many of us feel like we're helping by sharing this information really quickly, and then it goes viral and makes everybody freak out."
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