“I love how the internet, especially TikTok, can make generally insane situations funny,” Iacofano said. “It's kind of comforting to think that we've all just about faced this devastating news.”
Zarina Williams, a writer for a weekly newsletter on pop culture, politics, beauty and travel, also shared her thoughts on the Boeing debacle on TikTok, writing, “The B in Boeing stands for 'borrowed time.'” I joked.
“There's a lot of black humor,” said Williams, 38.
Although she herself hasn't seen any of the videos, Helene-Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation, a Paris-based organization dedicated to building critical thinking and media literacy, explains how this situation is a joke. I understand that there is a possibility that it will be used as material.
“For content creators, that's interesting,” she said. “This helps us get hits with these videos and memes.”
But Bouygues says that the more frequently users are exposed to content that may have initially seemed ridiculous or patently false, the more it starts to feel real and possible.
“It may seem perfectly healthy and self-congratulatory to say that these are ways to send a warning to companies,” Bouygues said, drawing attention to real safety concerns through comedy and exaggeration. You mentioned the post. “But in reality, what they're doing is creating viral misinformation within the community.”