9/11 footage is reaching new audiences — and fueling old conspiracy theories

Even 25 years later, the planes keep crashing, and the towers keep falling. All across the web, people who are old enough to remember September 11, 2001, are rewatching the attacks and rereading about the aftermath, often via devices and platforms that didn’t exist 25 years ago. But that’s not what stands out most. It’s this: Some younger people are watching for the very first time. “More than 100 million Americans are too young to remember that day,” former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently observed. Some of them are discovering the horrors of 9/11 now, clip by clip, on video sites like YouTube and TikTok. The experience can feel transportive, with viewers traveling back in time to an era of VHS tapes and landline phones. But it can also feel disorienting and deceptive, with very little context separating the harrowing historical record from inane conspiracy theories. There are many entry points, some more reliable (and respectful to the victims) than others. Personally, I recommend going the documentary route. The acclaimed film “9/11,” featuring rare footage of heroic firefighters inside the World Trade Center, is streaming on CNN All Access. Several major networks are also debuting new films timed to Friday’s 25th anniversary. The public interest is palpable. “Turning Point: Generation 9/11,” a new documentary about the anniversary, was Netflix’s no. 2 most-watched movie around the world last week. On Google, rising queries include “how many stairs did the firefighters climb” and “who were the hijackers” — perhaps a useful reminder for news organizations to re-share archival content. Some outlets are already doing so. The CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” has been sharing clips from past 9/11 stories on its social media accounts all week long. The History Channel is resurfacing interviews with survivors since it is history now, after all. But it’s all being delivered by the same chaotic social media feeds that increasingly blur fact and fakery. Random and anonymous X and Instagram accounts are capitalizing (some might say exploiting) the anniversary by posting old TV clips and tributes, but also, in some cases, unhinged lies and innuendo. Users who click into even a dryly factual 9/11-related post are likely to find a comments section littered with heinous conspiracy theories. The truth is out there, too, but people usually have to search for it. When 9/11 becomes content fodder A frequent entry point is the raw video of the TV coverage from the morning of the attacks. On YouTube, some of the most popular searches relating to 9/11 are “9/11 news coverage as it happened” and “videos of the plane crash.” One YouTuber compiled playlists of apparently bootlegged 9/11 broadcasts. Another created a compelling “multi-view” showing eight channels’ coverage of the first 18 minutes of the disaster in New York. WNYW, the city’s Fox affiliate, was the first local TV station to break in, and CNN was the first national network to do so. “You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot,” CNN anchor Carol Lin said as a camera pointed at lower Manhattan showed a gash in the side of the North Tower. National Review’s Jim Geraghty, recognizing that young people are consuming 9/11 content for the first time, began his Thursday column by writing, “Kid, the thing that none of the documentaries will show you was how that morning, after the first reports, nobody knew anything.” It’s so hard to convey what that uncertainty and terror felt like. But the feeling comes through in the minute-by-minute news coverage. The videos also show how TV news anchors were, as historian Garrett Graff once said, “the closest thing that America had to national leaders on 9/11… fulfilling a very historical role of basically counseling the country through this tragedy.” People in New York City looked up in shock and dismay; people everywhere else watched their favorite anchors on old-fashioned television sets and looked for updates on very rudimentary versions of news websites. There were no live-streams, no tweets, no AI-generated deepfakes. “Yes, there were toxic rumors and conspiracies even without the yet-to-be-invented Facebook and X,” former TIME editor Nancy Gibbs wrote. “But compared with what has transpired since then, the information landscape looks practically pristine.” In 2001, major media outlets mostly controlled the images that were transmitted to the public. TV networks pointedly refrained from showing photos and videos of people falling and jumping from the towers. Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s iconic “Falling Man” photo “ran once” in most newspapers “and never again,” Tom Junod wrote in a feature for Esquire that gets widely shared on social media on every 9/11 anniversary. There were lengthy debates about whether, when and how the networks should show other potentially traumatic content, like videos of the planes hitting the towers. But on YouTube and a phalanx of other sites that were launched years after 9/11, there’s no editor to think through the sensitivities and no end to the looped video clips. As-it-happened TV coverage contains misreporting, which was inevitable considering the chaotic circumstances. But conspiracy theorists have seized on those misstatements — along with some routine technical glitches and low-resolution video clips — as supposed evidence for a range of false claims about the attacks. For all its imperfections, that day-of coverage remains one of the clearest records of how the attacks unfolded in real time. If you’re interested in reading more about the TV coverage, I wrote in great detail years ago about what happened inside the network control rooms on 9/11. I noted that the attack presented TV producers with a stark new test for prospective talent: “Would you want them on the air on 9/11?” Today, as algorithms resurface all this content, and as some people see the falling man for the first time, I’m left wondering: What’s the psychological toll of one generation’s most traumatic memory becoming another generation’s TikTok content?