Found some disinfo on TikTok today which had apparently started on Facebook. It’s a video that promotes a variety of bogus and increasingly bizarre claims — there are plastic shards in rice that show up when put in a hot pan, harmful magnetic gunk in your baby formula you can extract with a magnet, poisonous washing powder in your ice cream that can be revealed with a drop of lemon juice.

The TikTok version gets scrambled a bit when you try to watch it in a browser, and WordPress.com doesn’t allow TikTok embeds yet. Thankfully eagle-eyed Twitter user @infuturereverse linked me to a Facebook version of the video so you can watch it here. (And please, please, do watch it, it’s fascinating).

It did well on Facebook too — but that’s not really news at this point. What strikes me is the TikTok success, since this is more rare, and yet seems very TikTok.

Why? Well, it’s presented as a “hacks” video (a genre very popular on TikTok). Hack videos — especially hacks around domestic issues — do well. Some are pretty solid. Others are technically honest but you wonder a bit about the practicality.

There’s also a variation in the form of the “replicable prank ” video. I think of it as a “hack” variation because it usually shows a simple way to execute the prank on others, and executing it requires some knowledge. Pranks as replicable memes often look like hacks. This sort of content already spreads misinformation, where some hacks are overhyped, such as the “hyphen” iPhone Prank that is presented as “erasing your friends phone with a voice command” but really just temporarily crashes the iPhone launcher.

In higher level pranks, the poster pranks the audience intentionally with a “hack” that doesn’t work — for example, demonstrating that the iPhone comes with a secret pair of AirPods that you will find if you tear the box apart, or the current sensation on TikTok of finding cash in hotel bibles, presumably placed by Christians there to reward the faithful. (This is a modern variation on an urban legend that dates back to the 1950s, and made its original digital rounds as an email hoax).

What may not be clear to non-TikTok users is how this sort of fakery is replicated as a meme. One person “finds” money in a bible, then other people post videos of “finding” cash in the bibles. The fake hack spreads not just through the increasing reach of the initial video, but through its replication by others. It suddenly seems like dozens of folks are finding cash in bibles.

These sort of fake hacks work on multiple levels in TikTok. In cases like the bible cash, they are sort of Santa Claus-ish: a group of people in the know bonds around these knowing these are fake, but enjoying and sometimes sustaining the joke through through faking evidence, the way parents fake Santa Claus eating cookies on Christmas. Another group of people believes the hacks are real, and a larger group enjoys wondering if they are real or not in a way that makes the world a bit more magical. It’s really not harmful if people flip through their bibles in hotel rooms and experience some brief anticipation of a cash find. (It’s also spawned some interesting variations where people put non-cash fandom-related things in hotel bibles.)

It’s also interesting to me that for a lot of these you can’t know if it is faked unless you try it yourself — and it is tempting to try, as with the likely real “soda hack”:

As with practical jokes, if you do try to replicate and fail — if, for instance, you try to replicate the meme where you rub your finger against a battery and try to levitate a penny — it’s pretty tempting to pay it forward by creating a fake video yourself (in this case by using video reverse: you spin a penny, watch it fall to a stop, rub your finger against a battery, then reverse the video). I don’t think this is a perversion of TikTok culture — I think it *is* TikTok culture, which often looks like an older sibling showing something new to the middle kid who then shows it to the youngest.

Malicious misinformation is relatively rare on TikTok, but it seems to me that where it does emerge the “food hacks” video is one format that will mesh well with TikTok culture — fake hacks, tricks, and “inside knowledge” loaded with false framing.

What would that look like? It’d look very urban legendish: If there’s an eight next to your product’s barcode it means it was produced by slave labor, if you find these marks in the Starbucks bathroom it’s a sign children have been trafficked there. If your phone makes this kind of static noise it could be a sign of radiation from cell towers, and you need to move away from them immediately. For political stuff, TikToky versions of “this voting machine didn’t record my vote” etc.

The good news is since there’s not really a way for creators to monetize anything on TikTok yet it’s likely to be pretty tame compared to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, at least in the immediate future. But it’d be nice to see people thinking about this sooner rather than later — how do you moderate a TikTok culture that values the sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge “Santa Claus” fakery with one that would like to keep more toxic fakery at bay?

We’ll be adding a couple TikTok examples to our current educational materials, but in the meantime feel free to ask your TikTok misinformation questions below.