Fake News Proven in 2021 but Revived
Women at the Time Were So Afraid They Could Not Go Out
Fake news claiming that men declared April 24 as 'Rape Day' has spread on the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok, causing controversy. This news was already proven to be fake in 2021.
According to AFP News Agency, on the 1st (local time), a fake news post circulated recently on TikTok stating that “multiple men declared April 24 as Rape Day, allowing rape to be freely committed on that day.”
When TikTok set related phrases as banned words and deleted the posts, similar posts using special characters or abbreviations were reposted. It is currently reported that even these circumvention attempts have all been blocked.
This false information was already proven to be fake news once in 2021. According to the watchdog group Media Matters, the post first appeared in the UK in 2021 claiming that “boys created a ‘National Rape Day,’” and then quickly spread on TikTok.
The source of this post is unclear, but it spread worldwide including the United States and the UK, surpassing millions of views. Many women who saw the video were engulfed in fear to the extent that they declared they would not go outside on April 24.
In the UK, there was even a report of an 11-year-old girl going to school carrying a weapon to protect herself from rapists.
At that time, several organizations investigated the facts, and it was confirmed that the information about someone declaring Rape Day was baseless fake news from the start.
AFP News Agency introduced the situation by saying, “The false news from 2021 has come back like a zombie after two years,” and pointed out, “It is not known whether any actual crimes related to this news occurred, but even disproven information can incite public threat and confusion.”
Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, USA, analyzed, “Sensational stories that feed on people’s innate fears and desires always become prey to misinformation, even if they have been refuted in the past.”
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