Kids these days — eating Tide Pods, cooking NyQuil chicken, requesting litter boxes to go to the bathroom. Viral narratives about the behavior of teenagers are catnip for concerned parents, the media, and politicians alike. Parents are worried about their children, journalists are eager to share the latest information on what teens are supposedly up to, and politicians are prone to believing and spreading stories that support their policies and beliefs. And though it can seem silly to believe that young people are snorting condoms or identifying as cats, these hoaxes and overblown stories speak to a larger problem.
Freelance internet culture journalist Kelsey Weekman, who reported on the phony NyQuil chicken craze, believes that on a small scale, the spread of these viral stories about teens can come from a good place. But on a larger scale, Weekman believes they can feed into destructive conspiracy movements like Q-Anon, which promotes the idea that Hollywood elites and satanic politicians sex-traffic children. “It comes from a place of wanting to protect kids,” Weekman told Teen Vogue. “On a big scale, it’s Q-Anon. There’s also a moral satisfaction in saying, ‘Well, back in my day, we never did that.’”
And wild, invented stories about young people can be useful for politicians and authority figures, Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz pointed out. In Lorenz’s extensive reporting on online culture and social media, she’s identified the following cycle: A rumor surfaces, often in a “mom group”; concerned parents alert the local police; the police issue a statement; the statement is picked up by the local news; then politicians use the non-issue for their own benefit. “Seeming like you’re cracking down on something that doesn’t even exist is an easy way to score political points,” Lorenz said. The bogus trend or theory is used to justify an action that was previously desired, Lorenz explained, such as putting more police officers in schools or bolstering surveillance programs.
Below, Teen Vogue looks into some of the most popular bogus stories about what young people are up to.
1. Students are identifying as cats.
Can you believe schools are providing litter boxes for students who identify as cats? You can’t? Good, because it’s not true. In fact, NBC News was able to find only one school that has litter boxes on campus — and that’s in case students are on lockdown in their classrooms during an active shooter situation.
The claim that schools were giving litter boxes to kids who identify as cats apparently began at a Michigan school board meeting, according to The New York Times, where a parent made the false statement. From there, it was shared on Facebook by Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party. “Kids who identify as ‘furries’ get a litter box in the school bathroom,” Maddock wrote. “Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools.” Republican politicians across the country latched onto the falsehood, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO.) and Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH.) By creating a myth centered around furries, a small subculture of people who roleplay as animal characters and, according to The New York Times, are sometimes associated with sexual fetishes in popular culture, this lie was able to become a weapon in the culture war against LGBTQ+ young people. “What’s most provocative about this hoax is how it turns on two key wedge issues for conservatives: educational accommodations and gender nonconformity,” Joan Donovan, a professor who studies disinformation, told NBC News. The hoax reached such heights that school officials were forced to set the record straight.
2. TiKTokers are cooking chicken in NyQuil.
In September 2022, the Food & Drug Administration issued a dire warning: Do not cook chicken in NyQuil. According to Weekman’s reporting, the myth of NyQuil chicken has been around since 2017, when a 4chan user posted about boiling chicken in NyQuil and eating it. The photos were then posted to Reddit, where they went viral. Some TikToks showed people reacting to the NyQuil chicken recipe (though not actually eating it themselves), which might have been the catalyst for the FDA’s warning. But Weekman found that NyQuil Chicken wasn’t trending until after the FDA issued its warning. “There have been no reported deaths or illnesses from NyQuil chicken so far,” Weekman wrote. “But a lot more people now know about it.”
3. Teens are snacking on Tide Pods.
According to memes and breathless media coverage, teens were downing Tide Pods because the tiny detergent packs looked too much like fruit snacks to resist. Coined the “Tide Pod challenge,” videos reportedly circulated on social media of teens daring each other to eat the packets of detergent or cook them in frying pans. A columnist for the Denver Post used the Tide Pod challenge as an argument against lowering the voting age — after all, if teenagers are eating colorful detergent pouches, how can we trust them to vote responsibly? But the Tide Pod challenge was largely overblown. In 2017, there were 53 intentional misuses of the pods among teenagers, a spokesperson for the American Association of Poison Control Centers told Time. The Washington Post reported that a lot of the laundry pod exposures were actually unintentional consumption by children, even as right-wing pundits called the supposed craze the result of “the breakdown of the American family.”
4. The condom challenge is all the rage in US schools.
There was a time when parents were worried their teens might take part in the “condom challenge” in which they “snort an unrolled condom up one nostril and pull it out from their mouth.” But while the frenzy around the supposed viral challenge peaked in 2018, The Daily Beast found that the first mentions of the condom challenge dated back to 2007, and videos of people taking part in the challenge peaked in 2013. Snopes deemed the claim that teens snorting condoms was a real trend “mostly false,” even as experts warned parents of the danger their teens might be courting and national media outlets covered it as being a fully viral trend.
5. A chicken woman is encouraging kids to engage in self-harm.
Behold the Momo challenge: The story went that a viral image of a frightening, skeletal woman with bug eyes was encouraging teens and children to commit suicide or acts of violence. Kim Kardashian even posted a plea to her hundreds of millions of Instagram followers to pressure YouTube to remove the offending images from its videos. But there was no hard evidence that the supposed Momo challenge was real or resulted in violence or suicide. As New York Magazine put it: There’s a lot to worry about when it comes to your kids on YouTube, but Momo isn’t one of those things.
6. Social media is encouraging students to slap their teachers.
“Beware, educators,” the California Teachers Association warned in 2021, “One of the latest trends on social media is a ‘challenge’ that encourages students to physically attack (‘slap’) educators and video-record it.” But the supposed viral challenge was largely debunked and there was little evidence that teens were slapping their teachers. Vice didn’t find any TikTok videos featuring students striking teachers and the entire “slap a teacher” challenge proved to be just another example of the way viral hoaxes can be breathlessly reported by journalists without any real confirmation.
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