Found some disinfo on TikTok today (which had apparently been shared on Facebook as well). It’s a video that goes through a variety of completely bogus claims — there are plastic shards in rice that show up when put in a hot pan, harmful magnetic gunk in your baby formula, poisonous washing powder in your ice cream that can be revealed with a drop of lemon juice.

The TikTok version gets scrambled a bit when you try to watch it in a browser, and WordPress.com doesn’t allow TikTok embeds yet. Thankfully eagle-eyed Twitter user @infuturereverse linked me to a Facebook version of the video so you can watch it here. (And please, please, do watch it, it’s fascinating).

It did well on Facebook too — but that’s not really news at this point. What strikes me is the TikTok success, since this is more rare, and yet seems very TikTok.

Why? Well, it’s presented as a “hacks” video (a genre very popular on TikTok). Hacks videos — especially hacks around domestic issues — are very popular on TikTok. Some are pretty solid. Others are honest but you wonder a bit about the practicality.

There’s a variation which is the “replicable prank ” video. I think of it as a variation on the hack video though, because it usually shows a simple way to execute the prank on others, and know if it will work often requires some knowledge. This sort of content already spreads misinformation, where some hacks are overhyped, such as the “hyphen” iPhone Prank that is presented as “erasing your friends phone with a voice command” but is really just temporarily crashes the iPhone launcher. Higher level pranks prank the audience intentionally with a “hack” that doesn’t work — for example, demonstrating that the iPhone comes with a secret pair of AirPods that you will find if you tear the box apart.

Misinformation is relatively rare on TikTok, but it seems to me that where it does emerge this is one likely format — fake hacks, tricks, and “inside knowledge” loaded with false framing. If there’s two nines in your product’s barcode it means it was produced by slave labor, if you find these marks in the Starbucks bathroom it’s a sign children have been trafficked there. If your phone makes this kind of static noise it could be a sign of radiation. For political stuff, TikToky versions of “this machine didn’t record my vote” etc. The good news is since there’s not really a way to monetize anything on TikTok yet it’s likely to be pretty tame compared to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, at least in the immediate future.