“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.
But reflex-dependent viral content has a short life span. When Durfee and I chatted three days after he posted his first video about the porcelain challenge, he already could tell that it wasn’t going to catch as widely as he’d hoped. RIP.
Nevertheless, viral moments can be reanimated with just the slightest touch of attention, becoming an undead trend ambling through Facebook news feeds and panicked parent groups. Stripping away their original context can only make them more powerful. And dubious claims about viral teen challenges are often these sorts of zombies—sometimes giving them a second life that’s much bigger (and arguably more dangerous) than the first.
For every “cinnamon challenge” (a real early-2010s viral challenge that made the YouTube rounds and put participants at risk for some nasty health complications), there are even more dumb ideas on the internet that do not trend until someone with a large audience of parents freaks out about them.
Just a couple of weeks ago, for instance, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about boiling chicken in NyQuil, prompting a panic over a craze that would endanger Gen Z lives in the name of views. Instead, as Buzzfeed News reported, the warning itself was the most viral thing about NyQuil chicken, spiking interest in a “trend” that was not trending.
And in 2018, there was the “condom challenge,” which gained widespread media coverage as the latest life-threatening thing teens were doing online for attention—“uncovered” because a local news station sat in on a presentation at a Texas school on the dangers teens face. In reality, the condom challenge had a few minor blips of interest online in 2007 and 2013, but videos of people actually trying to snort a condom up their nose were sparse. In each case, the fear of teens flocking en masse to take part in a dangerous challenge did more to amplify it to a much larger audience than the challenge was able to do on its own.
The porcelain challenge has all the elements of future zombie content. Its catchy name stands out like a bite on the arm. The posts and videos seeded across social media by Durfee’s followers—and the secondary audience coming across the work of those Durfee deputized—are plausible and context-free.
