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The so-called Tide Pod Challenge, a bizarre viral social media phenomenon involving teens sharing videos of themselves consuming liquid laundry detergent pods, crossed over into fake news territory in mid-January 2018 with the publication of an article stating that members of the Marine Corps have taken up the fad. An 18 January post on the satirical Duffel Blog said that the Corps' top leaders had issued a warning to junior troops to stop eating the pods after an unspecified number were hospitalized as a result of doing so: While we do not doubt that youthful military personnel are as susceptible as anyone else to idiotic fads, we've found no reports in reliable news sources of U.S. troops hospitalized for laundry detergent poisoning. A disclaimer on the Duffel Blog web site describes its content as entirely fictitious: Just days before the Duffel Blog article appeared, the American Association of Poison Control Centers issued an alert warning that the health consequences of ingesting detergent pods can be severe, possibly leading to seizures, respiratory arrest, and even coma. It also reported that the rate of self-inflicted poisonings by this means had increased dramatically during the first two weeks of 2018: Facebook and Google (which owns YouTube) announced on 18 January that they are deleting Tide Pod Challenge videos from their platforms because they encourage dangerous activities, a violation of community guidelines.
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