Videos of 'Titan Submersible Implosion' and 'Screams' Flood Social Media
Videos purporting to reveal audio footage of the Titan submersible imploding and screams from within the vessel have proliferated across social media platform TikTok, prompting concerns about the spread of disinformation about the tragedy.
While a U.S. Navy official said after the search and rescue operation had uncovered the submersible's debris that a top secret detection system had heard an "anomaly" around the time it was thought to have imploded, this recording has not been made public.
Fact-checking websites have said videos claiming to be of knocking sounds detected while the vessel was still missing have been shared on Facebook and Twitter as well.
It is unclear what steps, if any, TikTok has taken to limit the spread of such videos. Newsweek contacted the social media company via email for comment on Wednesday.
Titan, a tourist submersible operated by OceanGate, lost communication with its surface ship while descending to view wreckage of the Titanic on the morning of June 18. A debris field was found by deep-sea robots on June 22, and parts of the imploded sub have been dredged up and brought to Newfoundland in Canada for investigation.
On June 28, the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of a multinational investigation into the incident, said human remains had likely been recovered from the Titan's wreck.
The five people onboard—OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, billionaire Hamish Harding, former French Navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman—are now presumed dead.
The same day the U.S. Coast Guard announced the discovery of the vessel's remains, an anonymous Navy official told the Wall Street Journal a noise had been detected in the region of the Atlantic Ocean Titan had been in that could have been it imploding, but it had been treated as "not definitive." The Navy later shared the information with the search and rescue team, they said.
However, the Navy has not released any audio recordings, either of the detected implosion or earlier sounds of underwater "banging,"— later found to be unrelated—to the public.
Newsweek approached the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy via email for comment on Wednesday.
One video, uploaded to TikTok on June 25, which purports to contain the sound of Titan's implosion, has since been viewed 4.9 million times and shared externally to the platform nearly 10,000 times, as of 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday. The same audio has been replicated in 11 other videos.
Another clip, purportedly of screams from within the vessel, has been viewed nearly 450,000 times after being uploaded to the video sharing site on June 22. It has been replicated in two other videos.
Further audio of the supposed screams has been viewed 2.3 million times after being uploaded to TikTok on June 23.
The same audio—taken from amateur horror film Five Nights at Freddy's—has been replicated in 333 separate videos, including one which has separately been viewed 9.9 million times.
The claims about the Titan sub circulating on social media have drawn the ire of Alan Estrada, a Mexican actor who was the first from his nation to travel on the submersible in 2022.
In a TikTok video on the subject on Tuesday, he told his viewers in Spanish: "All those videos and audios that appear to you from the moment of the implosion, of the screams inside Titan, all those videos and audios are false."
In a tweet on Saturday, he said: "After what happened with Titan, it's amazing how many lies and how much misinformation there is on the internet and how easily people believe everything they read. The traditional and serious media are the only ones that have stuck to the truth."
Previously, fact-checkers Politifact and Full Fact said audio supposedly of the "banging" sounds had been spread on Facebook. Fact-checking website Snopes found on June 23 that some of the TikTok videos featuring the "banging" audio had used sounds from well-known memes.
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