When is a trend not a trend?
The porcelain TikTok trend has turned out to be fake, with the creator claiming he has been banned from the video sharing app.
Over the years, TikTok has seen some stupid things go viral, whether it was ripping soap dispensers off the wall, or dangerous challenges.
The latest one has gone above and beyond to fool people though.
What is the porcelain challenge on TikTok?
The fake trend was started by a TikTok user named Sebastian Durfee, posting as @childprogeny.
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He shared a video where he encouraged people to start a fake challenge and to help him go viral with it.
Durfee wanted to start a trend that creators were smashing and grinding up porcelain into a powder and snorting it.
“Help me make videos with the hashtag #porcelainchallenge to freak out the boomers," he wrote.
He didn’t participate in the challenge and isn’t encouraging anyone to do it, but he wanted to see if any news outlets or the older generation would fall for it and think it was true.
Someone even made a fake Fox News video about the challenge.
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Articles started to pop up reporting the porcelain challenge as if it was a real thing.
There is now a fear that some young people might think it is a real trend, with harmful consequences.
Back in 2017, the Nyquil chicken challenge started as a joke but escalated quickly.
The FDA was forced to issue a warning telling people that they should not soak chicken in Nyquil an warned of the dangers.
Durfee now claims that TikTok has banned his account for promoting "dangerous acts,” however he insists he just wanted to parody “fearmongering” with his trend.
“I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find the sweet spot of manufacturing something that is blatantly false and have the receipts to prove it — anyone could look it up and find out where it started,” he explained.
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“But still be interesting enough that people will want to get in on it and help it spread.”
The account no longer exists on TikTok at the time of writing (05/10/2022).
However, the porcelain challenge hashtag now has 5.4 million viewers, and porcelain has 871.5 million views.
“And for the most part, it seemed like everybody who knew about it was in on it and was part of the joke, and I didn’t think it would progress any further than that,” Durfee said.
Jen Thomas