The Disinformation Around TikTok’s “National School Shooting Day”

Friday, December 17, was deemed “National School Shooting Day” by various anonymous TikTok accounts, which encouraged viewers to incite violence at their schools, including shootings and bombings. They promoted violence in every school, across K-12 schools, with messages that all schools in the U.S., including elementary, would have a shooting. However, high schools were regarded as higher risk as most attacks have happened in secondary schools.

Late Thursday night, December 16, my high school sent out an email to the community acknowledging the trending TikTok threat and reassuring students and parents that, although the threat was deemed to be not credible by the FBI and local law enforcement, they would be increasing security measures across the boarding school campus. On Friday, all students, staff, and their on-campus families were shaken to see a local police presence around our school.

The FBI confirmed on December 16 that the nationwide TikTok threats were not credible and unlikely to result in violence. However, many schools, including those in Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Montana, New York, and Pennsylvania, reportedly increased security, and a handful of schools in California, Minnesota, Missouri, and Texas decided to cancel all classes that day.

Meanwhile, on TikTok, disinformation quickly spread about the “National School Shooting Day,” including differing accounts of what it involved, why it was happening, and who was behind it. In a tweet posted the morning of December 17, TikTok stated that it “exhaustively searched for content that promotes violence at schools today, but have still found nothing.” TikTok claimed that the threat did not originate on its platform and further stated that the company was “working to remove alarmist warnings that violate our misinformation policy,” and that “If we did find promotion of violence on our platform, we’d remove and report it to law enforcement.”

Thankfully, the school day ended with no shootings. But the damage was done for many, including me:

The threat was terrifying. In the past four years of my high school experience, school shootings have been very widespread and have felt like a very real possibility at my own school. Since 2018, 92 school shootings have occurred in the U.S., resulting in 60 deaths. There were 24 school shootings nationwide in both 2018 and 2019. In 2020, with COVID forcing a shift to online classes, school shootings dropped to 10 attacks that year but jumped to 34 attacks in 2021 as classes resumed; there were seven school shootings between November 25 and December 25 alone, the last of which took place at an elementary school and resulted in six casualties and 17 injured.

And yet, after the fact, opinions differed on how schools should have handled the threats. In a December 17 PBS NewsHour interview, Justin Patchin, a criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, said, “There are these potential threats [schools] can’t ignore, but they also can’t shut down schools every time someone posts a generalized threat on social media.”

On the other hand, Laurel Thompson, who is on the board of the School Social Work Association of America (SSWAA), stressed to The Washington Post that “We never know which [threat] is going to be the one. We never want to make a mistake.”

Over the last two decades — a period of time longer than I’ve been alive — mass murders resulting from school shootings have been an all-too-frequent and all-too-acceptable occurrence. It’s understandable that educators today are anxious about school shootings and err on the side of caution — students in the U.S. risk experiencing inexcusable violence and possibly even death every day. The visible reaction and panic caused by the “National School Shooting Day” rumors illustrate how immediate and personal the threat has become to young people everywhere.