“I love how, collectively, the internet – especially TikTok – will just somehow make crazy situations funny,” Ms Iascofano said. “Well, I’m kind of comforted by the fact that we’re all pretty much dealing with, like, this traumatic news.”
Zarinah Williams, author of a weekly newsletter on pop culture, politics, beauty and travel, also shared her thoughts on the Boeing fiasco on TikTok, where she joked that “the B in Boeing stands for ‘borrowed time.’
“There’s a lot of dark humour,” Ms Williams, 38, said.
Although she hasn’t watched any of the videos herself, Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation, a Paris-based organization dedicated to building critical thinking and media literacy, understands how the situation could be used as fodder for jokes.
“For a content creator, it’s funny,” he said. “It helps him get hits on those videos and those memes.”
But according to Ms. Bouygues, the more often users are exposed to content that might initially seem ridiculous or obviously false, the more it starts to seem real and possible.
“It may seem very self-serving and congratulatory to say that these are means to send notices to companies,” Ms. Bouygues said, referring to posts that draw attention to real security concerns, including comedy or exaggeration. “But, in reality, what they’re doing is creating viral misinformation in the community.”
