Presenting the Don’t Fall For Social Media Challenges Challenge - BirminghamWatch (original) (raw)

Tom Arenberg is an instructor of news media at the University of Alabama.

Here’s a rare Arenblog cooking tip: Don’t marinate your next chicken dinner in NyQuil. It’s terrible.

OK, I didn’t really do that. But you’d think from a wave of news media reports last year that a lot of people did.

The “sleepy chicken challenge” is just one example from a long list of supposedly widespread social media “challenges” that the news media have dutifully reported on and warned against in recent years.

Letting the public know that reckless social media posts are inviting people (especially young people) to try bizarre, alarming and even dangerous stunts is a worthy public service. The problem is, evidence indicates that in most cases the challenges were not widespread on social media and people really weren’t doing them in any significant numbers.

They were overblown moral panics boosted by some lackadaisical news media.

The latest instance occurred last week in this state, when national media such as NBC’s Today Show and People magazine picked up an ABC 33/40 report that four drowning victims in the past six months had died while engaged in a “boat jumping challenge” that originated on TikTok. The basis for the report was an interview with a member of the Childersburg Rescue Squad.

But that first responder quickly backed off that statement when asked again by AL.com, and the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency issued a statement saying there was no evidence that any of the drowning deaths were connected to a TikTok challenge. There’s not much evidence online that such a challenge even exists.

According to social media experts, here are just some of the other supposedly trending social media challenges that got overhyped by the news media in the past few years. Not to say instances of these never happened, but the public attention and fear greatly surpassed reality.

• The “Tide Pod challenge” that required eating a small packet of laundry detergent.
• The “electrical outlet challenge” that required touching a coin to the prongs of a partially exposed electrical plug.
• The “slap a teacher challenge.”
• “Devious licks,” which required vandalizing a school restroom.
• The “cheese challenge” that bizarrely entailed throwing a piece of sliced cheese onto a baby’s face.

Naturally, the performance of each of these was supposed to be videoed and posted on social media.

The blame on journalists for overselling goes down when a well-meaning government regulator or a company steps in with a public warning of its own. It’s understandable to report that. That happened, for instance, with the Food and Drug Administration and the NyQuil chicken.

Nefarious influences have played a role, too. The Washington Post reported a remarkable story in 2022 that Facebook paid a PR firm to conduct a behind-the-scenes campaign to make rival TikTok seem dangerous. The “slap a teacher” and “devious licks” challenges, which actually appeared first on Facebook, were among the firm’s smear attempts.

Regardless of the actions of others, reporters can conduct their own internet research to figure out the origin and spread of a topic. Reporters whose beat is the internet know how to do this, but it’s useful for all reporters.

My department colleague Dr. Jess Maddox, who recently wrote about the purported boat jumping challenge and whose social media expertise I’m leaning on in this post, wrote a commentary last year as part of Nieman Lab’s 2023 predictions for journalism.

She made the key point that most of the threat of dangerous copycat behavior comes from talk about the behavior in the news media and on social media, not from actual videos of the challenge being performed. “Unless people in the press retain internet experts … they’ll continue to do more harm than any internet challenge ever could,” she wrote.

The headline atop her prediction? “Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture.” Yep.

Tom Arenberg is an instructor of news media at the University of Alabama. He worked for The Birmingham News and the Alabama Media Group for 30 years. He published this commentary originally as a post on his blog, The Arenblog.

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