TikTok pranksters scare parents by showing fake video of BBC nuclear war declaration

Tracey watching the warning, which she believed at the time was real 

Charlie Davis, who goes under the handle ‘Charlie Davis is Magic’ has 1.2 million views on his ‘end of the world prank’, while 19-year-old Glaswegian musician Ross Loudon’s video pranking his mum Dawn McMutrie, 40, has had 2.2 million views.

YouTube currently hosts a plethora of fake videos of nuclear attack warnings, with the BBC forced to clarify that one video, set in a quasi-BBC studio and warning of a thermonuclear war was fake, after it made the rounds on WhatsApp and online.

In 2018 they Tweeted: “This video clip claiming to be a BBC news report about NATO and Russia has been circulating widely, particularly on WhatsApp. We’d like to make absolutely clear that it’s a fake and does not come from the BBC.”

The video features actor Mark Ryes and was produced for an Irish company in 2016.

Mr Ryes previously told the Telegraph: "It was created by a company called Benchmarking Assessment Group as a psychometric test for their clients to see how they’d react in a disaster scenario.

"On the original YouTube posting it says very clearly that it’s fictional. It doesn’t even look like a genuine BBC News report. It was never meant to.”

While it may be a fun prank to play on your mum, Prof Beatrice Heuser, an expert on nuclear strategy, at the University of Glasgow, said that content creators should “beware of accidents and inadvertent real reactions if something like this were picked up and taken seriously by paranoid Russians who see conspiracies everywhere”.

“Russians have no sense of humour when it comes to this sort of event.  

“When in 1984, during a particularly tense period of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan jokingly said in front of a microphone – unaware that it was already recording – that “We begin bombing in five minutes", this was massively exploited by Soviet anti-Western propaganda,” she warned.