'Trauma Porn': Tiktok Trend Depicting Holocaust and 9/11 Victims Under Fire for 'Sensualizing Horrific Events'

Following a new trend of filming videos from the first-person perspective, many young Tiktok users produced videos where they pretended to be "dead victims" of some of the world's most tragic events, such as the Holocaust and 9/11 terrorist attacks, stirring a lot of controversial reactions across social media.

The trend started by individuals wearing makeup and certain Jewish symbols to say that they are amongst the victims who fell during the historic event, "welcoming viewers into heaven" and getting into details as though they are narrating stories of "their last moments before being killed".

Tiktok videos that have been referred to as "trauma porn" have successfully attracted millions of views on the Chinese-owned platform mostly popular among teenagers and young adults. 

However, the videos have been described as "disturbing and insensitive" attempts to "sensualize trauma" in order to gain more online viewership, especially as it seems to offend and trigger survivors who are still suffering the consequences of these crimes, particularly the 2001 attacks that impacted Manhattan, NY and Washington, DC, where millions of people who are still alive witnessed the horrific incident.

Many social media users also considered videos referring to the Nazi holocaust that targeted millions of Europe's Jewish population in the 1940s as "antisemitic,, which is why they urged TikTok creators to stop producing and posting similar videos.

This attack on "survivors' videos" comes only days after TikTok announced a massive crackdown against US-based accounts that spread hate speech, including ones promoting Nazi ideas.

In their statement, TikTok announced removing 380k videos and banning more than 1000 users who have violated the platform's hate speech policy.

For about a year now, TikTok has been facing a lot of international accusations of not taking proper action against inappropriate content, which could have been the main reason behind the latest campaign against thousands of videos.