Shake it off: how TikTok is taking on the virus

Take the greetings. Handshakes, and skin-to-skin contact generally, are an easy means for the disease to spread. On TikTok, the concept of greeting people without touching them has become a meme: the wave, the elbow, the “Thai wai” (hands clasped, head bowed). You may by now have encountered the “Wuhan shake”: footage went viral in which several men in the Chinese city forgo handshakes and touch their feet together instead. This goes for handwashing and face-touching too: a song put out by Vietnamese officials to encourage people to wash their hands has spawned a TikTok dance challenge; meme armadas have been repurposed (example: Sex Education’s Eric’s immortal line “wash your hands, you dirty pig”).

Downsides abound, of course. Stockpiling how-to videos are all over TikTok and YouTube (despite the latter attempting to discourage monetising coronavirus content by tagging it as a “sensitive subject” less likely to appear on its channels). Memes about the respiratory illness have spread on the former thanks to a music clip created by user playboierik21 that repeats the words “It’s corona time” to the electronic beat of Don’t Stop the Rock by Freestyle. But while videos of teens disinfecting surfaces before touching them are du jour, the “Corona Virus Check” (with appropriate upward inflection on the “check”) is an unhelpful TikTok trend: a quick tick list of all the extra items snaffled from supermarket shelves.

Influencers are also cashing in. Blogs on face mask make-up, tips-and-tricks for surviving self-isolation and recipes for stockpiled food abound. Some are harmless, many are fun, but there’s plenty of disinformation, too. Facebook is busy removing conspiracy theories (secret labs, magic cures and government plots) related to coronavirus flagged by global health organisations, in addition to labelling coronavirus misinformation with “fact check” labels to let users know that such content had been rated false and providing free advertising space to the World Health Organisation.