The Tiktok generation’s latest prank: launching World War Three
FOR those who lived through the Cold War it would be their worst fear – an emergency alert flashing on to their television screens announcing: “This is an emergency broadcast.”
However, for the Tiktok generation, it is no more than a harmless prank, played on unsuspecting parents whose reactions are filmed and posted on the social media app.
Tracey Stebbing was watching television with her husband and son when the fake message flashed up.
“I thought it was the end of the world,” said the 57-year-old.
Unknown to Ms Stebbing, her son, Shaun Perrett, had connected his phone to their smart TV and used it to broadcast a fake warning from Youtube. He was also secretly filming her reaction.
The message said: “Evacuations are currently taking place in the London area. This is an emergency broadcast from the BBC. Information of a possible nuclear strike against this country has been received. The threat level is critical meaning the attack is imminent.”
“I’m scared,” Ms Stebbing, a parttime cleaner and artist, can be heard saying on a video posted by her son to Tiktok.
Ms Stebbing, from Swindon, said her mind immediately went to the 1986 film When the Wind Blows, about a married elderly couple surviving a nuclear blast.
“That was in my mind at the time, thinking ‘oh my God, the explosion could get into people’s houses’.
I was thinking ‘people who have got a cellar are lucky because they can go down into it’.” Mr Perrett had come up with the prank the night before while watching videos about underground bunkers in London during the 1960s and 1970s at the height of the Cold War.
The 25-year-old social media influencer said: “I saw that someone had created a fake nuclear warning and I was thinking ‘this is the time to get mum when she least expects it’.”
His video, which has been viewed 1.4million times, has launched a new trend, with copycat prank posts by teenagers unable to attend school, and young people who have gone back home during the pandemic.
Ross Loudon, a 19-year-old musician from Glasgow, attracted 2.2million viewers after filming his mother’s reaction to the “end of the world”.
Youtube hosts a plethora of fake videos warning of a nuclear attack, with the BBC being forced to clarify that one clip, set in a realistic-looking studio, was fake, after it was shared widely.
“We’d like to make absolutely clear that it’s a fake and does not come from the BBC,” the corporation said in 2018.
While it may be a prank, Prof Beatrice Heuser, an expert on nuclear strategy at the University of Glasgow, said people should “beware of accidents and inadvertent real reactions if something like this were picked up and taken seriously by paranoid Russians who see conspiracies everywhere”.
“When in 1984, during a particularly tense period of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan jokingly said in front of a microphone – unaware that it was already recording – that, ‘we begin bombing in five minutes’, this was massively exploited by Soviet, anti-western propaganda,” she added.