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The Titanic Truthers of TikTok



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The finer details of what happened to the RMS Titanic differ depending on who is telling the story.The iceberg that collided with the luxury liner was spotted at 11:40 p.m., according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or 11:35 p.m., which is what an exhibition about the ship in New York claims. The Royal Museums Greenwich in Britain says the doomed vessel cost 1,503 people their lives, while the Smithsonian in the United States claims that 1,522 passengers and crew died.Historians have attributed the variance to factors like imperfect ticketing lists and rushed head counts transmitted using weak signals. The broad strokes, however, are not in question. All credible experts agree that on April 15, 1912, less than a week into its maiden voyage, the Titanic ended up at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.More than a century later, on TikTok, a far different version has been circulating. In a post that garnered more than 11 million views before it was removed earlier this year, one user wrote: “the titanic never sank!!!”On the short-form video app, long-established facts about the crash are being newly litigated as musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content — a demonstration of TikTok’s potent ability to seed historical revisionism about even the most deeply studied cases.One 32-second post opens with a dramatic bl …

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