A video shows a woman who says that her 14-month-old baby is transgender and is going to medically transition to be a girl.
This video is a satirical, ‘rage bait’ skit by a content creator on TikTok designed to generate engagement.
A video of a woman claiming her 14-month-old son is transgender has been viewed millions of times and shared widely online by people believing it to be genuine.
But the clip is a satirical skit from a TikTok creator, posted as ‘rage bait’—content designed to provoke anger to drive engagement online.
One example of the video, which was viewed 12 million times on Facebook but has since been deleted after Full Fact got in touch, had a caption saying: “I am so proud of my 14 month old for transitioning!”
A woman in the video holding a baby says her 14-month-old was “born a boy but now uses she/her pronouns”. In another version of the same clip, shared on Instagram, the woman says she is trying to get an appointment with a doctor to secure medication to “stop the male hormone taking over”.
But these videos are satire.
However, many comments from people interacting or sharing the video show that people are taking it at face value. On one now-deleted post, of the 81,000 reactions, over 50,000 were ‘Angry’, as opposed to just under 15,000 that were ‘Haha’. Other versions of the video on social media have plenty of comments that imply people think the video is genuine.
In an interview with the Lancashire Evening Post the video’s creator Laura Birchall from Chorley said: “The video is satire click bait rage bait or whatever you want to call it and the response to it goes to show the state the world is in to believe anything like this could be remotely true.”
She also describes the video in a different clip as an example of “how you successfully rage bait”. Her original video has 3.5 million views on TikTok. The creator also posted a follow-up video in which she said they were beginning “day one of baby Bella’s hormone shots”.
Rage bait content is posted on social media by creators who aim to make viewers angry, and as a result generate higher engagement through outraged comments, shares and reactions.
It’s important to consider before sharing a video like this whether its intention could be to provoke engagement by being deliberately divisive. Our toolkit can help you better navigate misleading content online.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as satire because the video is not real, but a video created as ‘rage bait’ by a creator on TikTok.
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