Shortly after we spoke on Monday, Durfee sent me an update: TikTok had permanently banned his account (which had 150,000 followers), apparently as a result of this experiment. The company didn’t give him a reason for the permanent removal, but he said that they did take down two videos for “promoting dangerous behavior”: one in which he told viewers to post warnings about the porcelain challenge in local Facebook groups, and another in which he shared a screenshot of some early media coverage of his work. TikTok confirmed on Wednesday that it had banned Durfee’s account, and said that it viewed any content, including hoaxes, that promotes dangerous behavior as a violation of their community guidelines.
“It goes without saying that neither these videos nor any other ones I created glorified, endorsed, or depicted performing the challenge,” he emailed me on Wednesday. “The fact that they reacted to the challenge as if it was real by banning me entirely is the sort of knee-jerk widespread panic the challenge was meant to critique in the first place; the irony here is not lost on me.”
Durfee’s goal was to get views, which he got in spades before his account was banned. It was also to examine how attention and outrage work online. If a content creator performs all the parts of a moral panic, will the fact that the challenge itself is a complete fiction actually change anything about its spread?
I’ve reported on moral panics about The Children many times over the years. Right now, it’s the season when people annually freak out about the possibility of THC-laced candies in their kid’s trick-or-treat stash. This fear, along with the many other warnings that deadly candies might be handed to kids by the sadist next door, have thrived every fall for decades merely on possibilities and what-ifs: dig into the “proof” cited by those pushing these warnings and you’ll find that it doesn’t stand up.
It doesn’t need to. Social media often works by reflex. Content that does well practically begs to be shared right away, reality be damned. And in the case of teen challenges and dangers to children, those warnings are often passed along by sources that carry some authority in their communities: the Facebook pages of local law enforcement, local media, or school officials.
“I’ve dabbled in the past with trying to make fake news that is transparent about being fake but spreads nonetheless,” Durfee said. (He once, with a surprising amount of success, got a false rumor started that longtime YouTuber Hank Green had been arrested as a teenager for trying to steal a lemur from a zoo.) On Sunday, Durfee and his friends watched as #PorcelainChallenge gained traction, and they celebrated when it generated its first media headline (“TikTok’s porcelain challenge is not real but it’s not something to joke about either”). A steady parade of other headlines, some more credulous than others, followed.