In a wild sign of the times, TikTok users have been posting videos that claim the recent snow storm isn’t actually snow, but some sort of mysterious substance sprayed by the Biden Administration and/or Bill Gates to “protect the wealthy elites,” or something. The crazed videos include TikTok users attempting to melt snowballs with a lighter or a hair dryer with little success, which is actually a normal chemical reaction called “sublimation” where the solid snow turns into a gas instead of a liquid. But, clearly, these junior conspiracy theorists aren’t interested in science as much as trying to prove that sinister forces are tricking them for… reasons.
Via Insider:
One video went viral on Twitter but has since been removed from TikTok. In the video, a woman burns a snowball with a lighter. “Thank you Bill Gates for trying to f—ing trick us that this is real snow. You’ll see it’s not melting, and it’s going to burn,” she says. The person who posted the TikTok to Twitter said in a subsequent tweet that they did not believe in the video’s claims.
As Insider notes, #governmentsnow and search results for “fake snow” have skyrocketed since the freak winter storm in Texas, which was a very real storm with very real snow by the way. But while these latest batch of conspiracy theories are similar in theme to recent QAnon videos accusing Biden and Gates of nefarious deeds, the fake snow theory actually dates back to 2014 when a rare blizzard swept through the South. Despite attempts to explain the science behind the weather event, online commenters remained convinced that the 2014 storm was a government plot, and that mindset has unfortunately come roaring back.
(Via Insider)