The porcelain challenge didn’t need to be real to get views

I’ve written about a million stories over the years about the way in which moral panics about teen challenges get attention online and in mainstream media. In this iteration, I interviewed a TikTok creator who completely made up the “porcelain challenge,” and then asked his followers to try to get it trending across social media.

Here’s some of that story:

Despite what you may have heard, the teens are not stealing their family’s fine dinnerware, tossing it in a blender, and snorting the resulting dust for the “porcelain challenge.” That’s just what Sebastian Durfee, a 23-year-old actor and TikTok creator, hoped you might believe when he spread the word on social media of the latest dangerous teen challenge. 

Never mind that it was all fake from the start.

On Saturday, Durfee posted a call to action to his followers: to work together to get “boomers to freak out about a fake TikTok challenge.” He chose the porcelain challenge—which, once again, is just a thing Durfee made up—because it seemed like something that would be plausibly dangerous, but not something “the average person could go off and do very easily,” he told me this week. Besides, it’s a catchy name. His original video quickly passed half a million views, and TikTok slapped a warning on it for promoting dangerous acts. 

Meanwhile on TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, #PorcelainChallenge videos created by those in on the joke started asking people to spread warnings and share stories of (fake) injuries and deaths from those who tried it. One particularly clever video takes the bit to the next level, with the creator claiming that videos of people trying the challenge are being removed by TikTok moderators immediately—a way to explain why there’s no available video of any person actually doing this. 

[read the full story at MIT Technology Review]